North Hills Life Care and Rehab

North Hills Life Care and Rehab is in Fayetteville, Arkansas. We gave this nursing home a quality overall grade of B+. After grading the other alternatives in Fayetteville, this appears to be a slightly higher quality selection than the majority of them. Based on our ratings, this facility looks like a good fit for most people. The best aspect of this facility's impressive report card was its inspection reports. Inspection reports are discussed in the next paragraph

In addition to earning a strong overall rating, this facility performed even better in the area of inspections which is based on the nursing home's recent inspection reports. In fact, we awarded it an A for this category, which is one of our best grades. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite minor. 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.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so favorably is that it was awarded a favorable long-term care grade. Indeed, long-term care turned out to be its second highest category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility a grade of A. In a long-term care setting, the primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. Once we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 93.81818 percent of its residents for pneumonia. This nursing home also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 1.53 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days.

Turning to an additional strength for this facility, we gave them one of our better scores in our short-term care category as well, with a B. Our short-term care scores are presumably most important for patients requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires more skilled nursing. This includes not just nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. This nursing home employs both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities employ these skilled professionals. The last item we looked at in this category is the number of patients who ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that it performed as well as just about any facility in Arkansas in this area with 61.3 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, at most facilities, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

The last category we assessed is nursing. This nursing home received an above average nursing grade in our assessment, with a grade of C. Even though this is not as strong as several of its other grades, this remains a respectable grade for that area. Our nursing rating looks at the facility's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the number of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at a few quality measures in calculating our nursing grades. This place was above average in two of the major metrics we assessed, with good scores for minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.