The Home Place at Midway

In addition to being a great facility overall, it also received A+ government inspections in recent years. Its inspections are virtually flawless. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This facility received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its top-shelf resume, this facility also excelled in our long-term care category. In fact, it received a grade of A for the category. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia can be a life threatening ailment for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A- in our nursing category. Nursing grades are mostly based on the facility's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of moving a patient more often.

The fourth area we rated is short-term care, where this nursing home was given a B+. This finished off an elite report card. Not many nursing homes earned a B+ or higher in all four categories. In crafting these short-term care ratings, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to create a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.