Regency House

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this facility really excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned an A. Few facilities performed better in this category. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

In addition, we also wanted to draw your attention to the fact that this facility was given impressive long-term care marks in this assessment. We awarded them one of our better grades in this category, with a B+. This turned out to be the nursing home's second strongest grade. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in this category it is typically a good sign for patient care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home 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 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Unfortunately, this facility's third best score is short-term care. However, with a grade of D in this category, it still fared somewhat poorly. Our short-term care grade is often employed to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services To offer highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Given its grade in this area, we were not stunned to discover that this facility was well below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the data we assessed. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who returned home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.9 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.

The last category we scored was nursing, which proved to be this nursing home's weakest category. We gave it a lowly F in this area, which is certainly concerning. In determining our nursing grades, we assess both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of the nurses. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This facility had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these scores hurt this facility's nursing grade significantly.