The Highlands

To go along with its strong overall grade, we gave this facility a grade of A for inspections. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection ratings. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are relatively minor. While this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

Adding to its first-rate profile, this nursing home also performed well in our short-term care area. In fact, we gave it a score of A- for the area. In computing our short-term care ratings, we assess the facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is more often than not a meaningful measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that 6.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Additionally, this facility also was given favorable long-term care scores in our assessment. Indeed, we gave them one of our stronger grades in that category, with a score of B+. Nursing homes that receive this type of score in this category typically provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure patients are well cared for. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 59.00621 percent of its residents. This is slightly below what we anticipated. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The final area we scored is nursing. This facility received an impressive nursing rating in our assessment, with a B. Even though this isn't quite as elite as a few of its other scores, this is still one of our better grades in that area. We analyzed the qualifications of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the quantity of hours the nurses worked with residents, in calculating our rating in this area. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some quality-based measures in this category. This place fared well in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. For example, in terms of the number of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, this facility performed better than the national average. This is generally an indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented with better nursing care.