The Arbor

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection scores are based on many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

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. The nursing grade features a host of datapoints. The most important variable is the number of hours nurses spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home also performed well in the area of long-term care, where it received a score of A. Few facilities fared better in this area. For long-term care residents, the primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We were not able to find this facility's vaccination rates. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to the final area, this facility also performed well in our short-term care category. We awarded it a B+ for that category. This rounded out a very strong report card. Short-term care scores are based on a facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a vast spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we assessed in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 4.4 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.