North Central Health Care

One of the reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is it received an A+ in our inspections category. This is just about as good as it gets in this very important area. Inspection ratings are tied to many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this category have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among its many impressive grades, this nursing home was awarded a top-shelf short-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A in this category. Our short-term care grades are likely most meaningful for people needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not only nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.9 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

In addition, this nursing home also received favorable long-term care grades in our assessment. Indeed, we awarded it one of our better grades in that category, with a grade of B+. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. On top of considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 91.42857 percent of its patients. This is somewhat below what we anticipated but still a respectable percentage. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last area we analyzed was nursing, where this nursing home was given a grade of B. Believe it or not, this is this nursing home's worst category. A nursing home is doing something right when it's weakest score still is better than most facilities. There are a host of data points included in this area. Many of the factors relate to staffing levels. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also factored a few quality measures into our nursing grades. This nursing home was relatively weak in two of the major areas we focus on, with below average scores for minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care provided.