North Ottawa Care Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively insignificant. 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. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

This facility also received a first-rate short-term care score. In fact, this turned out to be this facility's second strongest category score. In that category, this facility received a score of A. Short-term care grades are vital for people in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes more skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a vast scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 5.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. Our nursing grade analyzes the facility's level of nurse staffing. We factor in both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the amount of time spent with patients. 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 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 frequently be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The next area we scored is long-term care. This nursing home was awarded an impressive nursing rating in our assessment, with a B. Although this wasn't nearly as impressive as many of its other scores, this is still one of our better grades for this area. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. 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 gave the vaccine to 97.849464 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.