Sylvan Health Center

On top of being a strong facility overall, it also received A+ inspections recently. Its inspections are virtually perfect. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to point out the fact that this nursing home was superb in our short-term care category. We gave them an exemplary grade of A+ in this category. Short-term care grades are commonly used to assess a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to have highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This nursing home is substantially above average in terms of its quantity of both registered nurse and physical therapy hours available to its residents. It supplied approximately one and a half times as much care per patient from both of these groups of skilled professionals than the average nursing home provided. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. In addition to excelling in the area of physical therapy hours, we found that it performed as well as just about any facility in the nation with 74.6 percent of its residents returning home.

The third category we looked at was long-term care. This nursing home performed well in our long-term care rating also. We awarded them a dominant grade of A+ in this category. When facilities receive this kind of score in this category it is typically a good sign for patient care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to considering the well above average quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff at this facility, we also were pleased by the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Lastly, we looked at the facility's number of hospitalizations. While it had 2.43 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted statistic was middle of the road due to it having more complicated patients.

In the final area, we gave this nursing home an A+ for its nursing grade. This rounded out a very favorable profile. There are a host of data points included in this grade. Many of the criteria relate to nurse staffing. This nursing home provided 5.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is among the higher figures in the country. A significant portion of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the more skilled levels of nurses. We are very impressed by both of these statistics. In addition to providing impressive levels of care, this facility also performed well in several of the quality measures we looked at. In terms of the percentage of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, this nursing home performed better than the national average.