The Hills Nursing & Rehabilitation

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this facility really excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of A. Few facilities performed better in this area. Inspection ratings are tied to several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

One of this facility's more favorable category scores came in the category of short-term care. This proved to be its second most favorable category. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of C. In the category of short-term care, we attempt to qualify indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. We were surprised to find that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we assessed. In fact, it offered fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The final metric we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.9 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is below average.

Turning to the category of long-term care, this facility was given just a D in this category. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. After looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is higher than the average nursing home. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.

The last category we scored is nursing. Sadly, it received an abysmal F for this category, which is an abysmal score. This is obviously a significant disappointment. We weighed the licensure of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the quantity of time those nurses spent with patients, in computing our grade in this area. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. On top of ranking below average in nursing hours per resident, this facility also had poor scores in the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This place was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in both of these metrics. This is a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These metrics pulled down this nursing home's nursing rating significantly.