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.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. The nursing grade is based on several datapoints, most of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving a resident even once per day.

The last category we scored was short-term care. This nursing home was given a B- for the category. Our short-term care grades are based on a facility's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a vast spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, in addition to other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from the facility. We found that just 4.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. This figure was below the national average.