Hillview Convalescent Hospital

On top of being a quality nursing home overall, this nursing home really excelled in nursing, where it received an A-. Our nursing grade assesses the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving a patient even once per day.

This facility also performed well in inspections, which is based on its recent inspection reports. In fact, we gave it a grade of B+ for that area. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite insignificant. This facility was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

Turning to another strength for this facility, we awarded them one of our more favorable grades in our short-term care category as well, with a B+. In computing our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This grade is often a fair measure of a facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. It does not appear that this facility submitted information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The final category we rated is long-term care, where we awarded it an above average grade of B. This nursing home really doesn't have any weak grades. When facilities receive this type of score in this category it is usually a good sign for resident care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. After looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.