Ossian Senior Hospice

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our nursing rating. In determining a nursing home's nursing grade, we assess the amount of time nurses are with patients and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Turning to inspections, this facility excelled in that area, which is based on the facility's recent government inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A for that category. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

This nursing home also was awarded a dominant short-term care score. Indeed, this is its third best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services To offer highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

The last area we scored was long-term care. This nursing home received a very good long-term care rating this year, with a C. Although this is not quite as good as many of its other category grades, this is nevertheless an acceptable grade in that category. Our long-term care grade is used to grade a facility's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services offered by a rehabilitation facility. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccines. Thankfully, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. This nursing home also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.