Shady Lane Nursing Care Center

On top of being a great nursing home overall, it also earned A+ health inspections recently. Its inspections were nearly perfect. Inspection scores account for a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this category typically have few of these severe deficiencies. 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.

Another reason we graded this nursing home so highly is that it was awarded an A+ short-term care score. This is just about as good as it gets in this category. Short-term care scores are vital for residents in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a broad range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The next area we analyzed is long-term care. Contributing to its dominant resume, this nursing home also excelled in that category. In fact, it received a of A for that area. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a deadly ailment for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In the last category we looked at, this nursing home received a very strong grade of A- in our nursing category. With this score, the nursing home rounded out a straight A profile. Nursing ratings are heavily correlated with quality and quantity of nursing care. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as predictive measures of the caliber of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.