The Terraces of Boise

In addition to being a first rate facility overall, this facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received an A+. Few nursing homes fared better in this category. There are many subcategories within this area. Most of these factors are tied to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.6 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 facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a system of turning residents more frequently.

Adding to its dominant assessments in other areas, we gave this nursing home a score of A for its short-term care grade. In the area of short-term care, we try to assess measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We look at a facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.3 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This nursing home also received a impressive long-term care grade. This actually is this nursing home's third strongest category score. In that category, we gave this facility a grade of A-. When facilities receive this kind of score in long-term care it is usually a good sign for patient care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. After considering the volume of nursing care, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia tragically can be a deadly ailment for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home does not roll the dice on this issue. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

For the last category we looked at, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned a grade of B+. Inspection ratings are tied to many data points located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this place had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.