Hilltop Care Center

In addition to receiving an elite overall grade, this facility received an A+ inspection grade. This is based on the facility's recent inspection reports. An A+ in this category is one of the highest complements we can pay to a nursing home. Inspection ratings are tied to many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received an A+ nursing grade, making it one of the few nursing homes to receive multiple A+ category grades. Our nursing score is largely tied to the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving patients at least once a day.

We also awarded this nursing home a of A+ for its long-term care grade. For patients seeking a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 86.25 percent of its patients. This is somewhat less than we expected but still a respectable figure. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Moving on to the next area, this nursing home was given a respectable short-term care rating. While this wasn't quite as elite as a few of its other category grades, this is still nothing to be ashamed of. Short-term care scores are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a broad spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we considered in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.2 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is below average.