Hill Crest Manor

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this place really excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned a grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. Our inspection ratings weigh several factors included in a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better scores in this category typically have very few of these severe deficiencies. This nursing home was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to create an immediate threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

This facility also performed well in the category of long-term care, with a strong score of A- in this area. Nursing homes that receive this kind of score in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure patients are well cared for. One of the datapoints we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. This is a proven method to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations for the nursing home population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next area we looked at was nursing, where we gave this facility an F. This was definitely one of this facility's major weaknesses. Our nursing rating assesses the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with residents. This facility provided just 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing ratings. This nursing home fared well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these statistics to be measures of the quality of nursing care.

The last category we assessed was short-term care, which is this facility's weakest area. It received an abysmal F in this category, which is certainly a major disappointment. Short-term care grades are based in part on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a vast spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. With a score of this caliber for this category, we were not shocked to learn that this nursing home was well below average in several staffing metrics we looked at. In fact, it offered significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most facilities. The last datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 3.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics doomed this nursing home's short-term care grade.