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 0.5 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. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The final category we analyzed is long-term care. This facility received a strong long-term care score in our assessment, with a B-. While this wasn't as good as several of its other category grades, this is nevertheless an acceptable score for that category. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is more than the average nursing home. This place keeps its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.