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. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

This facility also performed well in the area of long-term care. For this reason, we gave it a score of A- in that category, which is one of our most impressive grades. Facilities that receive this kind of score in long-term care tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure residents are well cared for. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Another strength of this facility is its favorable grade in nursing. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with an D. Our nursing grade includes many factors, however, the main consideration is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This place provided only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing ratings. This place performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

Switching gears to our fourth area, this facility really did not perform well. Due to an abysmal grade of F in short-term care, this was its poorest category. In forming these short-term care scores, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The purpose is to devise a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Based on its poor grade in this area, we weren't surprised to learn that this place offered significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other nursing homes. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 4.8 percent of this facility's residents returned home.