The Shook Home

In addition to being a first rate facility overall, this facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received an A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. Our nursing grade looks at the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of training of the nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving residents more frequently.

This facility also excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B+ for that area. Inspection scores are tied to pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspections. Places that score well in this category typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

This nursing home also was awarded an impressive long-term care score. In fact, we gave it an above average score of B+ in this area. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 87.30158 percent of its patients. This is a few points below what we anticipated. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last category we looked at was short-term care. We gave this nursing home a decent score in this area, with a C. Even though this was not as strong as several of its other grades, it is nevertheless not a poor grade. Our short-term care scores are meaningful for prospective residents requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates more highly-skilled nursing. This includes a broad scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 3.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.