Margaret Tietz Center for Nursing Care

In addition to performing well overall, this nursing home also earned nearly flawless government inspections. Therefore, it received one of our best scores in that category with an A+. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection ratings. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively minor. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its fine resume, this nursing home also was given an excellent short-term care grade, with a grade of A-. With our short-term care assessment, we try to forge a meaningful measure for rehabilitation. In doing so, we look at a facility's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Additionally, this facility also was awarded favorable long-term care scores in our assessment. In fact, we awarded it one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 99.82269 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly is often a dangerous illness for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In our last area, this nursing home also was awarded a first-rate nursing rating, with a B+. This completed a very favorable report card. Our nursing score analyzes the facility's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of skill of those nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.