Hunter Acres Caring Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few relatively minor dings aren't the end of the world.

Adding to its profile, this nursing home also earned a score of B+ for its long-term care rating. This is an above average grade in this area. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 90.11976 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which happens to be slightly less than we were hoping for but still a respectable figure. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. When determining our nursing grades, we weigh both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of the nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The next category we graded is short-term care. This facility was given a grade of C for the category. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to gauge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. It does not appear that this nursing home submitted data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually well below the national average.