Hill Haven Nursing Home

The primary reason this ended up being a decent nursing home is that it received an elite inspection grade. Its inspection grade was far better than its overall score. In our inspections category, we gave this facility a grade of A. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this place had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

In addition, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B+ in our long-term care category. This is one of our higher scores. When facilities receive this kind of score in this category it is usually a good sign for resident care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. One of the statistics we considered on top of nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a great way to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the senior population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home ended up receiving a rock-bottom score in our short-term care category. It received an F in this category. In the category of short-term care, we try to evaluate measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We look at a facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics sunk this nursing home's short-term care grade.

The next area we assessed is nursing. Sadly, it received an F in this area, which is a very poor score. This is certainly a significant concern. We assessed the licensure of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time those nurses spent with residents, in computing our grade in this area. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this nursing home had really bad marks in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. For starters, we looked at the percentage of residents sustaining falls leading to major injury. This place was at more than 1.5 times the national average in this statistic.