Oak Hills Living Center

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ in the area of short-term care. In computing our short-term care scores, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to formulate a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we looked at in this area is the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that 6.5 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. Nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility an A. Our nursing rating assesses the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We consider both the levels of training of those 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 nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In addition, this facility also received excellent government inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our best scores in that category, with an A-. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Moving on to our next category, this nursing home also performed well in our long-term care category. We gave it an A- in that area. This rounded out truly elite profile. When facilities receive this type of grade in long-term care it is typically a good sign for patient care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.