Sanford Hillsboro Care Center

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite insignificant. It doesn't look like we have information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. Nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. The nursing score weighs numerous factors. The most heavily weighted variable is the quantity of hours nurses spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

We also want to alert you to the fact that this facility was awarded a top-shelf score of A- in our short-term care category. Short-term care scores are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a broad spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, in addition to other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final item we considered in this category is the percentage of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Moving on to our fourth area, this facility received an excellent long-term care score. We gave it a grade of A- in this category, rounding out a straight A profile. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. Once we concluded our assessment of the amount of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly is often a deadly health condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't take any chances. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.