Ivy Hall Nursing Home

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to point out the fact that this facility received a top-shelf grade of A in our long-term care category. When facilities receive this type of grade in this category it is typically a good sign for resident care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. Once we assessed the amount of nursing care, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly can be a dangerous ailment for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home does not roll the dice on this issue. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning the page to our third area, we awarded this nursing home a score of A for our short-term care rating. This is a first-rate score. Short-term care grades are typically employed to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services To provide highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 6.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Moving on to our fourth area, this nursing home was awarded a high-end nursing grade. Although this isn't quite as impressive as some of its other grades, this remains one of our better scores a facility can receive. Our nursing rating focuses on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the number of hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as predictive indicators of the caliber of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.