Nova Health and Rehab

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. 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 graded this facility so well is that it received a strong long-term care grade. In fact, long-term care is its second best category score. In that category, we gave this facility a score of A. Nursing homes that receive this type of score in long-term care typically provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure patients are kept in good health. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 99.6633 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia tragically can be a dangerous ailment for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home does not take any chances. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but a grade in this range is not the end of the world. In computing our nursing grades, we look at both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, although this place got docked a bit for nursing hours, it excelled in a few of our quality-based measures. With fewer than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this statistic.

The final area we rated was short-term care, which proved to be this facility's least impressive category. We awarded this nursing home a D in that area. Nevertheless, you should not judge this nursing home based only on a single bad category, since it earned many excellent grades in other categories. In the category of short-term care, we endeavor to assess indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We assess a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. Unfortunately, we found that this place provides fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most nursing homes. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 3.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home.