Mason Health Care Center

The primary reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an elite inspection grade. In fact, its inspection score was far better than its overall grade. In the inspections category, we gave this facility an A. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Unfortunately, it does not look like we were able to find deficiency counts for this nursing home. We wish we had more data for this nursing home. Without having access to information regarding deficiencies, it ended up being a challenge to evaluate this nursing home in this category.

We also gave this nursing home a respectable score in the category of short-term care, where it received a B-. In the area of short-term care, we attempt to evaluate indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We assess a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of C. We looked at the licensure of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours the nurses were with residents, in determining our rating in this category. This particular facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This figure is significantly below the national average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home surprisingly fared better in some of the quality measures we assessed. In fact, it performed well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

The final area we rated was long-term care. For this category, we awarded this facility a grade of C. If you are seeking services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care grades. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination data. We were optimistic to learn that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. This facility also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.