North Hills Life Care and Rehab

This facility received a quality overall score as described above, but we especially want to emphasize its excellent government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A- in this area. Inspection ratings are tied to many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility truly excelled in the area of long-term care, where it received a grade of A-. Not many nursing homes performed more favorably in this category. For residents seeking a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 79.92424 percent of its residents, which is slightly lower than we anticipated. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B+ for its nursing rating. This is a well above average score in this category. We scrutinized the skill-level of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses were with patients, in computing our score in this area. This nursing home averages 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 nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The next category we rated is short-term care, where this facility was given a B-. Even though this is its poorest category rating, this is still not a terrible score. In calculating our short-term care grades, we assess a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This rating is typically a fair assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this facility provided data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who returned home from this nursing home. We found that 5.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well below average.