Sullivan Park Care Center

In addition to being a quality nursing home overall, this facility really excelled in nursing, where it received an A-. Nursing ratings are primarily tied to a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics 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 nation 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 policy of turning patients at least once a day.

We also awarded this facility a grade of A- for our short-term care grade. In calculating these short-term care ratings, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our purpose is to formulate a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of residents that returned home from this facility. We found that 5.1 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This nursing home also performed well in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. It earned one of our best grades in that category with a grade of B+. Our inspection scores are tied to many pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

The last area we rated is long-term care, in which this nursing home was awarded a grade of B-. While this ended up being its worst category rating, this is nevertheless a middle of the pack score. Our long-term care grade assesses a facility's personal care rather than the highly skilled therapy and healthcare services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is higher than the average nursing home. This facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.