Northside Health Care

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this nursing home performed at an even higher level in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A. Inspection grades are tied to several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B+ for its long-term care rating. This is a well above average score in this category. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is far higher than the average nursing home. 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 less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. The nursing grade is based on several datapoints, most of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This figure is far below average. Finally, although this facility got dinged a bit for nursing hours per resident, it excelled in a few of our quality-based measures. With less than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared well in this statistic.

The last category we looked at is short-term care, proved to be this facility's worst category. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in this category. This really was one of the few weak points on an otherwise strong profile. Our short-term care grades are considered to be more meaningful for residents needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically utilizes more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who returned home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.