The Terrace at Denison

While we were not high on this nursing home overall, we awarded it a grade of A- for our inspections rating. This score is significantly more impressive than the facility's overall score. These inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

The next highest category we awarded this facility in any category came in the area of long-term care, where we awarded it a grade of B-. In computing our long-term care grades, we scrutinize the personal care received by the facility's patients. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 92.10526 percent of its residents, which is a bit below what we were hoping for. Nevertheless, this nursing home was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 1.29 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a substantially better hospitalization rate than the average nursing home.

We awarded this facility a respectable grade in the area of nursing as well, with a grade of C. Our nursing grade features a variety of subcategories. The most important variable is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. This facility provides only 3.1 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is a somewhat concerning figure which is well below the national average. Finally, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally a reliable indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place.

This nursing home's weakest area is short-term care, which is the last area we assessed. For this category, we awarded this facility a grade of just D. In the category of short-term care, we attempt to evaluate measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents that were able to return home from this facility. This nursing home did not fare well here either. We found that just 48.1 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was below the national average.