Hillhaven

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. A few relatively minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

To complement its dominant achievements in other areas, we gave this facility a score of A for our short-term care rating. Short-term care grades are typically employed to measure a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To have highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final item we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. Our nursing grade focuses on the facility's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of training of the nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The final area we graded was long-term care, in which this facility was given a grade of C. This actually was this facility's least impressive category. This is nevertheless not a poor grade. Long-term care grades are commonly used to judge a nursing home's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing on the skilled nursing services offered by a skilled nursing facility. One of the factors we considered on top of nurse's aid hours is vaccines. Fortunately, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 95.901634 percent of its residents. Finally, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.