The Hearthstone

In addition to being a first rate facility overall, this facility also excelled in long-term care, where it earned a grade of A+. Few facilities fared better in this category. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the factors we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccines. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. This is a proven method to minimize unnecessary deaths for the elderly population. 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.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. In that area, we awarded this facility an A. In determining a facility's nursing rating, we consider the quantity of hours nurses commit to patients and the levels of training of those nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Turning our third area, this facility received a strong short-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it a score of A in that category. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services In order to provide highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that 5.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Another impressive feature for this facility is its inspection grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home a score of A-, wrapping up its straight A performance. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This facility was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that the inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to be an immediate threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.