Surrey Place Healthcare and Rehabilitation

On top of being an elite nursing home overall, this nursing home excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A+. Few nursing homes performed as well in this category. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

An additional reason we assessed this facility so highly is that it was given an A+ short-term care score. This is flat out as strong as it gets in this category. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to gauge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final measure we considered in this category is the number of residents who ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 6.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Nursing grades are largely tied to the nursing home's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed 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 typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of turning patients even once per day.

The fourth area we analyzed was long-term care. We gave it another first-rate grade of A+ in this category. This completed a perfect profile of straight A+'s. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is far higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.