Salude

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is it received an A+ inspection grade. This is as good as it gets in this critical category. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Although this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to direct your attention to the fact that this nursing home was superb in our short-term care category. We gave them an elite score of A+ in this area. With our short-term care grade, we try to create a fair measure for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we look at the nursing home's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we considered in this category is the percentage of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that 7.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This nursing home also received a high-end long-term care grade. This actually ended up being this facility's third best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this nursing home submitted information about vaccinations. Clearly, this facility 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 one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Switching gears to the fourth category, this facility was awarded a strong nursing score. We gave it a B+ in this category, wrapping up one of our better profiles. The nursing rating assesses many factors, many of which are based on levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.5 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 nursing home the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of turning residents at least once a day.