Home of the Innocents

This nursing home really fared well in the area of long-term care, where it earned an A-. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in long-term care it is a good sign for patient care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We also wanted to emphasize this place's nearly flawless government inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of B+ in this category. Inspection ratings are based on several items located in the a nursing home's inspection reports. Places that score well in this area have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This facility was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This tells you that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to be an imminent risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

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. In computing our nursing grades, we look at both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of the nurses. This facility provided just 0.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place surprisingly excelled in some of the quality measures we looked at. It performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the quantity of hours of care offered.

Moving on to the fourth area, we awarded this facility a D for the area of short-term care. This was the nursing home's worst category rating. Naturally, this grade pulled down the facility's overall grade to some degree. Short-term care scores are based on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a wide scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The last metric 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 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics was damning for this facility's short-term care grade.