Hirest Millard

In addition to being a first rate facility overall, this facility also excelled at short-term care, where it earned an A. Few facilities performed better in this area. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients that eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 6.8 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. Arguably the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. Our nursing grade analyzes a handful of factors, but the main consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics 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 facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning residents more often.

The next category we assessed is long-term care. This nursing home was awarded an above average long-term care score in our assessment, with a B-. Even though this is not nearly as impressive as several of its other scores, this remains a respectable grade in that category. Long-term care grades focus on a facility's assistance with daily living instead of the skilled therapy and medical services that are critical to a skilled nursing facility. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is more than most nursing homes. This place keeps its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.