New Harmony Care Center

One of the reasons this place received a great overall grade is that it received a very impressive nursing score. In fact, nursing ended up being its best category. In that area, we awarded this facility an A-. We scrutinized the qualifications of nurses at the facility, in addition to the number of hours the nurses were with residents, in calculating our rating in this category. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

We also want to emphasize this nursing home's nearly flawless health inspections recently. We gave them an A- in this category. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

Additionally, this nursing home also was given favorable short-term care scores this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our more favorable scores in that category, with a grade of B. In determining our short-term care ratings, we analyze a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is frequently a reliable assessment of the nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 4.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

The final category we rated was long-term care. We gave it a C in that category. This is not a bad grade in this area. For residents seeking a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 93.23671 percent of its residents. This is somewhat less than we anticipated but still a respectable figure. On a more positive note, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.