Hiram W Davis Medical Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. We scrutinized the levels of nurses working for the facility, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses worked with residents, in determining our grade in this area. This particular nursing home provided 1.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In addition, this facility also earned a nearly flawless government inspection report. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with an A. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. A couple minor deficiencies aren't something to panic about.

Building on its first-rate resume, this facility also received a strong short-term care grade, with a score of A-. In computing our short-term care ratings, we assess a facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This score is often a fair assessment of the nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The final category we analyzed is long-term care, where this facility was awarded a B-. This turned out to be this facility's least impressive category. This is still not a bad grade. In crafting these long-term care scores, we look at the facility's personal care services. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 39.130436 percent of its residents. This is multiple points less than what we expected. Nevertheless, this place keeps its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.