Joshua Tree Care Center

Joshua Tree Care Center is a small facility located in North Olmsted, Ohio. With an overall score of A-, this facility is one of the better facilities we looked at. In fact, we ranked this nursing home in the top 25 percent of all nursing homes in the United States. This facility's impressive profile was highlighted by its inspection grade, which is addressed in the next paragraph.

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Our inspection ratings are tied to several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. 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. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Nursing grades are tied to quality and quantity of nursing care. This facility provided 3.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these datapoints as good indicators of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

This nursing home also was superb in the category of short-term care, where it received a grade of A-. Not many facilities performed better in this category. Our short-term care ratings are thought to be more important for residents in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally requires more skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. When we assessed this facility's nursing hours, we found it offered more care from registered nurses than most nursing homes. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This place outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes in this area with 60.6 percent of its patients returning home.

The last area we looked at is long-term care. This facility received an impressive long-term care rating in our assessment, with a C. Although this wasn't as impressive as a few of its other scores, this remains a respectable score in this category. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is more than the vast majority of nursing homes. This facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.