The Grove at New Wilmington

On top of receiving a great overall score, this facility also received first-rate health inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our higher grades in this area, with a grade of A-. Inspection scores are based on many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this area have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

This facility really excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. We assessed the qualifications of nurses at the facility, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses worked with residents, in calculating our grade in this category. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Turning to an additional strength for this nursing home, we gave them one of our more favorable scores in our long-term care category as well, with a grade of B. If you are seeking services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care ratings. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 85.9375 percent of its patients. This is a bit lower than we anticipated. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The final category we scored was short-term care, where this facility was awarded a grade of B-. While this ended up being its weakest category rating, this is nevertheless not the end of the world. In the area of short-term care, we try to assess indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 3.9 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.