Northern Regional Hospital

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is it earned an A+ in our inspections category. This is just about as good as it gets in this very important area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively insignificant. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

On the list of its many impressive grades, this facility was given first-rate short-term care grade. In fact, it received a score of A in that area. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To offer highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of residents that ultimately returned home from this facility. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Contributing to its first-rate assessment, this nursing home also received a superb long-term care grade, with a score of A-. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. One of the factors we considered after nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 70.37037 percent of its patients. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The last category we analyzed is nursing, in which this facility was given a B. Even though this wound up being its worst category score, this is nevertheless a good score. We scrutinized the licensure of nurses at the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours the nurses spent with residents, in calculating our score in this category. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also factored a few quality-based metrics into our nursing grades. This place was relatively weak in two of the major areas we focus on, with below average scores for minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care provided.