The Ellis Nursing Home

On top of earning a strong overall score, this facility performed well in our inspections category, which is based on the facility's inspection reports. In fact, we gave it an A for this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are quite minor. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors did not consider 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.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. This turned out to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this facility an A-. Nursing scores are heavily correlated with levels of nurse staffing. This facility offers extremely high levels of nursing care, averaging 4.1 hours per patient on a daily basis. This is more nursing care than nearly any other facility offers. Finally, this nursing home also performed well in several of the quality-based metrics we looked at. By way of illustration, in terms of the percentage of its patients suffering falls leading to major injury, this nursing home performed as well as any facility in the country. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility was awarded a favorable long-term care grade as well. We awarded it one of our higher grades in that area with a grade of B+. Nursing homes that receive this kind of score in long-term care tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure patients are well cared for. This facility's vaccination statistics lagged a bit behind some of the other statistics in this area, such as its nursing hours data. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to just 58.876408 percent of its patients. We would like to see some improvement herein this statistic in the future. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In the last category, we awarded this facility a grade of A for our short-term care score. This topped off a very strong report card. In the category of short-term care, we seek to evaluate indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We assess a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and various therapists. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides a greater volume of physical therapist hours to its residents than the average nursing home. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. This facility was better than average with 49.3 percent of its patients able to return home.