Mother Hull Home

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. The nursing rating considers a variety of factors. The most heavily weighted factor is the number of hours nurses spend with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures 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.

In addition, this nursing home also earned a nearly flawless inspection report. As a result, it earned one of our highest grades in that area with an A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively insignificant. While this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor dings aren't something to panic about.

In addition, this facility also received favorable short-term care grades this year. In fact, we gave it one of our more favorable scores in that category, with a score of B+. Short-term care grades are generally used to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services In order to have high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last metric we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 4.7 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

The next area we rated is long-term care, in which this nursing home was awarded a B. Even though this is its poorest category score, this is still a favorable score. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. One of the factors we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a proven method to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the elderly population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.