Rising Star Nursing Center

One of the main reasons this proved to be a strong nursing home is that it received a very impressive long-term care grade. This was its best category. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of A+. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. 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 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility also performed well in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best scores in that category with an A. Few nursing homes with an overall grade in this range performed this well in multiple categories. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively insignificant. While this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of C. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but a grade in this range is not the end of the world. Our nursing score is based on a handful of factors, most of which are associated with quantities of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, although this facility got docked a bit for nursing hours per resident, it excelled in some of our quality-based measures. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it fared very well in this statistic.

The next category we analyzed was short-term care, ended up being this facility's weakest category. We gave this nursing home a D in this area. This really is one of the couple of weak links on a quality report card. In crafting these short-term care grades, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to formulate a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. It looks like this place was subpar in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the metrics we assessed. The last item we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.4 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics was damning for this facility's short-term care score.