Queen City Nursing Center

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was awarded an A+ long-term care grade, making it one of the few nursing homes to receive more than one A+ category scores. When facilities receive this type of score in long-term care it is a good sign for patient care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. Once we concluded our assessment of the volume of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly is often a life or death illness for nursing home patients so we like it when a nursing home doesn't take any chances. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. In calculating our nursing grades, we look at both staffing levels and the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a system of moving residents at least once a day.

The next area we rated was short-term care, where this nursing home received a B-. Even though this proved to be its weakest category score, this is nevertheless a middle of the pack score. In computing our short-term care scores, we analyze a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This rating is frequently a meaningful measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation. It doesn't appear that this nursing home provided registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually quite a bit below the national average.