Sterling Village

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received an A+ long-term care grade. For residents looking for a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 54.744526 percent of its patients. This is a few points below what we expected. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also 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 number.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. Nursing grades are largely tied to a facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics 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 often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning a patient even once per day.

This facility has earned near flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A- in this category. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This means that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Switching gears to our fourth area, this nursing home received an excellent short-term care rating. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- in that category, resulting in this facility receiving straight A's. In determining our short-term care grades, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The purpose is to formulate a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.