Stonehenge of Springville

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great facility is that it earned a strong short-term care score. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an A. Short-term care grades are commonly used to gauge a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to offer highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last metric we considered in this area is the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Inspection grades are tied to items found on the a nursing home's recent government inspections. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received a very strong long-term care score. In fact, this turned out to be its third best category score. In that area, this facility received a score of A-. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. Once we finished looking at the volume of nursing care, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia tragically can be a deadly illness for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a nursing home does not roll the dice on this issue. 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 less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next category we looked at is nursing. We gave this facility one of our higher grades in this category, with a B. Even though this isn't as dominant as some of this nursing home's other grades, it is still a perfectly acceptable grade. Nursing scores are largely associated with the facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 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 facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.