The Mather

We also found that this facility excelled in our long-term care rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to provide patients with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 95.55556 percent of its residents, which is more than most nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home also earned an A+ inspection score, making it one of the few places to receive multiple A+'s in our categories. This is based on the facility's recent inspection reports. An A+ in this category is one of the biggest complements we can pay to a facility. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The next category we looked at was short-term care. This facility fared very well in our short-term care rating also. We awarded them an elite grade of A+ in this area. In computing our short-term care scores, we size up a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This score is more often than not a reliable measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from this facility. We found that 5.4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Turning to our last area, this facility also was given an A+ nursing rating, leaving it as one of the few of facilities to be awarded four A+'s. In determining our nursing ratings, we assess both staffing levels and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at a few quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home excelled in these areas, with excellent scores for minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care a facility provides.