Ossian Senior Hospice

In addition to earning a strong overall score, this facility also excelled in inspections, which is based on the facility's recent inspection reports. In fact, we awarded it an A in this area. Inspection grades are tied to several pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this area have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also want to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home was given an impressive grade of A in our long-term care area. When facilities receive this kind of grade in this category it is usually a good sign for resident care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. 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 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The next category we analyzed is short-term care. This facility was given a very positive short-term care score, with a grade of B+ in the category. Short-term care grades are often employed to grade a facility's performance with rehabilitation In order to offer high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Turning to the fourth area, this nursing home received a high-end nursing rating. Even though this isn't nearly as impressive as many of its other grades, this is nevertheless one of the better scores we offer. There are quite a few factors included in this grade. Many of the criteria are tied to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as predictive indicators of the caliber of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.