Julia Temple Healthcare Center

In addition to receiving a strong overall grade, this nursing home fared well in our short-term care category. We awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our best grades. Short-term care grades are important for people in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a broad spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 5.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Adding to its impressive profile, this nursing home also performed at a high level in the area of inspections. In fact, it earned a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with an A-. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. We weren't able to locate deficiency counts for this nursing home. Without having access to all of the deficiency related data for this facility, it ended up being challenging to fully evaluate it in terms of this category.

Among this facility's other strengths is its elite nursing grade. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of A-. In calculating our nursing grades, we assess both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of turning a resident more frequently.

The last area we analyzed was long-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a B-. This was this nursing home's worst area. This is still not a poor grade. Our long-term care grade is typically used to assess a facility's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services provided by a rehabilitation facility. After looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination records. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this facility vaccinated 78.125 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is several points lower than the national average. Nevertheless, this facility keeps its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.