Carle Richland Memorial Hospital

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ short-term care grade. Our short-term care ratings are arguably more important for individuals needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 6.6 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

This facility has also received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also excelled in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a score of A. Few facilities performed better in this category. In a long-term care setting, the primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We weren't able to find information on vaccination rates. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In our final category, we awarded this nursing home an A+ for its nursing score. This completed a very impressive report card. In calculating our nursing grades, we assess both staffing levels and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these data points as predictive measures of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.