Simpson Memorial Home

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our short-term care grade. Short-term care grades are meaningful for people looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a broad spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

In addition, this facility also received excellent inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our better grades in that area, with a grade of B+. Inspection ratings weigh several factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher scores in this area usually have few of these severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. Our nursing grade assesses the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of skill of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place 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 often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning a resident more frequently.

The final category we analyzed was long-term care. In that category, we gave this facility a C. Our long-term care ratings are more meaningful for individuals in need of more traditional assistance related to personal care. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. We were somewhat surprised to discover that this nursing home vaccinated only 60.95238 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Nevertheless, this nursing home excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.