Tiffany Heights

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this facility really excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. Inspection scores are tied to many datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this area tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

This facility also was given a favorable grade in our long-term care category. We awarded this facility a better than average grade of B in that area. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is far higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The third highest category we gave this nursing home in any category came in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a C. Short-term care grades are meaningful for people in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a wide range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this facility submitted registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

The next category we analyzed is nursing. We gave this facility a D in nursing, rendering this the nursing home's least impressive grade. Nursing grades are based largely on quantity of nursing care available. This facility offered a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. In addition to its below average nursing hours, this nursing home also received poor scores in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We found that a higher percentage of this nursing home's patients sustained falls leading to serious injury.