New Richland Care Center

This nursing home earned a strong overall grade as discussed above, but we especially wanted to emphasize its excellent nursing rating. We gave them an A- in this area. Nursing ratings are heavily correlated with quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections. We gave it an B+ for that area, which is one of our highest scores. This is one of the few nursing homes with an overall grade in this range which earned multiple category grades this high. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively minor. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

This nursing home also received an impressive short-term care score. Indeed, we awarded it an above average grade of B in this category. In forming these short-term care scores, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to create a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we considered in this category is the number of patients that ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that 4.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Turning to our last category, we gave this nursing home a grade of D for the area of long-term care. This was the facility's weakest category grade. Sadly, this category hurt the facility's overall profile to a certain degree. Nursing homes that don't fare well in long-term care typically aren't as well-staffed and are lagging in a few of the areas of routine healthcare services we assessed. After assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 93.89313 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is a few points lower than we were hoping for but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. To our surprise, this place was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.