Hillview Health Care Center

In addition to being a strong facility overall, this nursing home also excelled in our short-term care rating, where it received an A+. With our short-term care grade, we seek to forge a sound gauge for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess the facility's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides more care with registered nurses to its residents than the average nursing home. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return home from this nursing home. This place performed as well as just about any nursing home in the country with 65 percent of its residents returning home.

This facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We gave them an A- in this area. Inspection ratings account for a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with better scores in this area generally have few of these severe deficiencies. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report, which is still very impressive. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing score. In fact, we awarded it an above average grade of B+ in this area. Our nursing score includes numerous factors. The most important variable is the number of hours nurses spend with residents. This place provides an incredible 4.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. Out of this total, many of the hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. On top of looking at levels of nursing care, we also looked at a few quality measures in determining our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these areas as predictive indicators of the caliber of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The last area we scored was long-term care, where this facility received a B. Believe it or not, this is this facility's worst area. A nursing home is doing something right when their poorest grade still is better than most other facilities. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. On top of offering very favorable levels of nursing care and other staffing, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. This percentage is also much higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. This combination proved to be effective as this nursing home also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had just 1.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a much lower hospitalization rate than the majority of nursing homes.