Iredell Memorial Hospital

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ short-term care grade. Our short-term care grade is typically used to judge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To provide high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final item we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 6.6 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This nursing home also received a nearly flawless inspection. As a result, it earned one of our highest grades in that area with an A+. This was one of the few facilities to receive multiple A+ category grades. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively insignificant. This facility was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies an immediate threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This first-rate facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Our nursing score is primarily associated with the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

In the final category we rated, this facility received a very strong grade of A in our long-term care category. With this grade, the facility topped off a straight A report card. If you are looking for anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care grades. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. We were not able to locate this facility's vaccination rates. 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 only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.