Hirest Manor

While we graded this facility incredibly poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable inspection report this year. As a result, it received a decent grade in that category with a score of B-. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being quite minor. This particular nursing home received 6 deficiencies on its inspection report. Overall, this is still a solid inspection report, but we'd always recommend looking into any deficiencies you find troubling.

Sadly, this facility only received a D for its long-term care score, which was actually one of its more respectable category scores. For long-term care residents, the primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

Another concern is the F this facility received in the category of short-term care. Our short-term care scores are likely more critical for individuals requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually requires additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Based on its grade in this area, we were not stunned to learn that this nursing home was well below average in terms of its 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 to find. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 5.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics was damning for this nursing home's short-term care grade.

The final category we assessed is nursing. This nursing home received an abysmal grade of F in that area. Our nursing grade assesses many factors, however, the main one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. With only 0.1 hours of nursing care per patient daily, this place's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below the national average. Unfortunately, this facility also had terrible scores in several of the quality-based measures to pair with its weak nursing hours. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers. This nursing home was at more than double the national average in this statistic. This is alarming when you consider that many bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the nursing home's fate of earning a weak nursing rating.