Hirest Health Care Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was not a highlight, it actually excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A- for that area, which is one of our best scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite insignificant. This nursing home received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that CMS didn't consider any of these deficiencies to be an immediate threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. Nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an C. Our nursing score analyzes the facility's level of nurse staffing. We factor in both the levels of skill of the nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place surprisingly excelled in some of the quality measures we assessed. It performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

Sadly, this facility's next highest score is short-term care. Nevertheless, with a grade of D in this area, it still fared relatively poorly. Short-term care grades are generally used to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation To provide high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature higher levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Based on its score in this area, we weren't stunned to discover that this nursing home is well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the metrics we looked at. Honestly, this was what we expected here. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.

Switching gears to our fourth area, this facility did not perform well in this category either. With a very poor grade of F in long-term care, this is just about as bad as it gets. Facilities that receive this type of grade in this category may not provide the type of consistent around the clock care that some other nursing homes offer. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. Frankly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this nursing home vaccinated 51.704544 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is several points less than what we expected. To our surprise, this nursing home actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had just 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.