The Hilltop on Main

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this facility really excelled in the category of inspections, where it received an A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite minor. While this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

In addition, we also wanted to draw your attention to the fact that this facility was given favorable long-term care marks this year. We gave them one of our more impressive grades in this area, with a B+. This proved to be the facility's second highest grade. If you are seeking anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care grades. After considering the volume of nursing care, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 86.131386 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The third area we assessed was short-term care. This facility's was given a low-end short-term care score where it received a lowly F. Our short-term care scores are arguably more critical for individuals in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually requires more highly-skilled nursing. This includes not only nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. With its score in this category, we were not stunned to find that this nursing home was well below average in terms of the number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The last statistic we considered in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics doomed this facility's short-term care score.

Turning to our last category, this facility didn't perform very well. With an abysmal grade of F in nursing, this was this facility's weakest category grade. The nursing category assesses a handful of subcategories, most of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This facility offered a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This figure is far below the national average. In addition to being below average in nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also had poor scores in the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This place was at about 1.5 times the national average in both of these data points. This is a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These scores helped pull down this nursing home's nursing rating quite a bit.