Hillcrest Nursing Center

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this facility really excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. 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.

This nursing home was awarded its next best category score in the category of long-term care. We gave this facility a B- in this category, which is a reasonably acceptable grade. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We were a bit alarmed this nursing home gave the vaccine to a relatively low 84.964195 percent of its patients. Fortunately, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of C in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. The nursing grade includes a handful of subcategories, however, the paramount consideration is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This particular facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This figure is significantly below average. Lastly, we also assessed several nursing quality measures. While this facility got docked a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it excelled in a few of these quality-based metrics. With fewer than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared well in this statistic. This is generally an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning residents more frequently.

This facility's worst category was short-term care, which is the last area we assessed. It received an abysmal F for this category. Even with several decent grades in other categories, this score is nevertheless of a concern so we wanted to draw your attention to it. Short-term care grades are often employed to score a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. With a score of this caliber in this category, we were not stunned to discover this nursing home was below average in multiple staffing metrics we focus on. It supplied substantially fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.