Royal Plaza Health & Rehabilitation

Royal Plaza Health & Rehabilitation is a nursing home located in Lewiston, Idaho, a city with a total of 34,230 people. We awarded this facility an A- overall grade, ranking it in the top 25 percent of all nursing homes in the nation. Based on our assessment, this place ought to be a wonderful choice for most people. This also is a very consistent nursing home with consistently strong ratings in all four of the major categories we assessed. Additional information about these categories can be found below.

To go along with its strong overall score, we gave this nursing home an A- for nursing. Our nursing score is primarily based on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 3.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these areas as good indicators of the caliber of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

This facility also received a very impressive short-term care score. In fact, this ended up being this nursing home's second strongest category grade. In that category, this facility received a score of A-. Short-term care scores are critical for individuals in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional skilled nursing. This means a broad spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. This facility provides more services with registered nurses and physical therapists than most nursing homes we looked at. The last measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that it fared respectably with 48.8 percent of its residents returning home.

Moving on to our inspection category, this facility excelled in that category, which is based on the nursing home's recent inspection reports. In fact, we gave it an impressive grade of A- for that category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are quite insignificant. 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.

The final category we graded is long-term care, where this facility was given an A-. This rounded out a very favorable report card. Very few nursing homes received an A- or better in in each area we assessed. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care tend to provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. One of the data points we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. This is a great way to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the senior population. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.