Hopkins Health Services

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Our nursing score is primarily associated with the nursing home's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility was given impressive marks in the area of short-term care as well. In fact, we gave it one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A. Short-term care grades are critical for people looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a wide range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 5.6 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility earned a grade of B for its inspections rating. This is a well above average score in this category. Our inspection grades weigh a host of factors included in a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better scores in this category generally have few of these severe deficiencies. Although this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

The last category we graded was long-term care, which was this facility's weakest category. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in this area. Nevertheless, we would not assess this facility based only on a single bad area, since it earned multiple very strong scores in other areas. For residents in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. Once we concluded our assessment of the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination record. We were optimistic to find that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this nursing home also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.