Ivinson Memorial Hospital

In addition to receiving an elite overall score, this nursing home also received an A+ inspection rating. This is based on its recent government inspections. An A+ in this category is one of the best complements we can pay to a facility. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively minor. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This top notch nursing home also excelled in the category of short-term care, where we awarded it a score of A+. Very few facilities performed better in this area. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to grade a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To have highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This nursing home excelled in two key staffing areas we looked at. The facility provided about 50% more care from registered nurses and physical therapists than the average nursing home. This is usually a very favorable sign. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of facilities in this area with 66 percent of its residents returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most nursing homes.

We also want to note the fact that this nursing home was awarded a strong grade of A in our long-term care category. For long-term care residents, the 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 patients. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down information on vaccination rates. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In the final category we scored, this nursing home was awarded a very favorable grade of A- in our nursing category. With this score, the facility wrapped up a straight A report card. Our nursing grade assesses the facility's level of nurse staffing. We consider both the levels of skill of those nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with patients. This place provides an incredible 9.6 hours of nursing care per patient each day. Very few nursing homes provide this quantity of nursing care to their patients. Out of this total, many of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. On top of providing high levels of nursing care, this nursing home also excelled in the quality-based metrics we assessed. By way of illustration, it performed as well as any facility in the nation in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these data points as good measures of the quality of nursing care being provided.