Phelps Health Hospital

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this nursing home received high marks in the area of short-term care as well. It received our highest grade in that category with an A+. Short-term care grades are typically used to gauge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. The last item we considered in this category is the number of residents that eventually returned 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.

The next category we looked at was inspections, where this facility also received an A+ grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This means that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was elite in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a score of A. Not many facilities performed better in this category. For prospective patients seeking a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are very important. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination statistics. It does not look like this facility submitted data regarding vaccinations. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In the last category we rated, this nursing home was given an impressive grade grade of A- in our nursing category. With this score, the facility topped off a straight A profile. The nursing rating is based on many components, most of which are based on levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.7 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 avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.