Phelps Health Hospital

One of the many reasons this place turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ in our inspections category. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received an A+ short-term care grade, rendering it one of the few nursing homes to be awarded more than one A+ category grades. Short-term care grades are generally employed to judge a facility's rehabilitation services. To have highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, this nursing home offers both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities offer both. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 6.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Moving on our next area, we gave this nursing home a grade of A for its long-term care grade. This is a superb score. Nursing homes that receive this type of score in this category typically provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are kept in good health. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were not able to track down this facility's vaccination rates. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In the last category we scored, this facility was awarded an impressive grade grade of A in our nursing category. With this grade, the facility topped off a straight A report card. When computing a nursing home's nursing grade, we consider the number of hours nurses are caring for residents and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home averages 0.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.