Stoneridge Health Care

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received an excellent short-term care score, with a grade of A. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to measure a facility's rehabilitation services. To have good rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.3 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Adding to its impressive category grades, this nursing home excelled in the category of inspections, where it received an A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This place was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to be an immediate risk to resident safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B+ for its nursing rating. This is a well above average score in this category. Our nursing score includes quite a few subcategories, most of which are tied to quantities of 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 many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The next area we looked at was long-term care. We gave this facility one of our higher scores in this area, with a B. Although this was not on par with several of this nursing home's other grades, it is nevertheless a perfectly acceptable grade. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure patients are well cared for. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.