The Nicol Home

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ long-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. One of the criteria we considered after nurse's aid hours is vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 78 percent of its patients. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it received a grade of A-. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This facility was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to create an immediate threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B+. In computing our nursing ratings, we analyze both nursing hours and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we graded was short-term care. This nursing home was awarded a strong short-term care grade this year, with a B-. Even though this isn't as impressive as a few of its other category grades, this is still an acceptable score for that category. Our short-term care ratings are probably more meaningful for individuals needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically requires additional skilled nursing services. This means not only nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well below average.