Hillcrest Nursing Center

The primary reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an excellent inspection score. In fact, its inspection score was far superior to its overall score. In our inspections category, we gave this facility a grade of A. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This particular nursing home received 9 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.

Another one of this nursing home's more impressive category scores came in the category of long-term care. In that area, we awarded this facility a B. It actually fared better than most nursing homes in this category. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 88.41608 percent of its residents. This is a bit less than we anticipated. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of C. Nursing ratings are based in large part on nurse staffing levels. This place provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a much lower figure than we were hoping for. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place actually excelled in some of the quality measures we assessed. In fact, it performed well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

This nursing home's least impressive area was short-term care, which is the final category we looked at. Sadly, it received a lowly F in this category. Despite some acceptable grades in other categories, this grade is still concerning so we would like to to make sure you are aware. In the area of short-term care, we endeavor to assess measures of a facility's rehabilitation services. We assess a facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Considering its grade in this category, we weren't surprised to learn that this nursing home was well below average in terms of the number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its patients based on the measures we assessed. The final datapoint we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 3.6 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics doomed this facility's short-term care score.