Ball Pavilion

In addition to being a first rate nursing home overall, this place also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned a grade of A. Not many nursing homes performed better in this area. Our inspection scores account for a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category generally have few of these severe deficiencies. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Contributing to its strong assessment, this facility also was awarded a superb short-term care grade, with a score of A-. In computing these short-term care scores, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to devise a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of patients that eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 5.2 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

The next category we looked at was long-term care. Adding to its dominant resume, this nursing home also excelled in that category. In fact, we awarded it a of A- for that category. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 96.07843 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a life threatening ailment for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In the last category we assessed, this nursing home received a very strong grade of B+ in our nursing category. With this grade, the nursing home topped off an elite profile. Our nursing grade is based on a handful of data points, but the most important one is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.