Towers Nursing Home

This nursing home earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Our inspection ratings are tied to several pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This place received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate risk to resident safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

This nursing home also excelled in the area of long-term care, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes fared better in this area. Facilities that do well in this category tend to provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 99.5098 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a life threatening ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home does not leave this to chance. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The next category we analyzed was short-term care, where this nursing home's score wasn't nearly as impressive as its other grades. In that category, we awarded this nursing home an F. Short-term care ratings are based on a facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a vast scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The last statistic we considered in this area is the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 4.9 percent of its residents returning home. This was quite a bit below the national average.

This facility's worst area is nursing, which is the last category we scored. It received an F for this category. In spite of a few solid grades in other areas, this grade is still alarming so we wanted to make a note of it. We looked at the levels of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the number of hours those nurses were with patients, in computing our score in this category. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. On top of its subpar nursing hour totals, this facility also earned poor marks in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing grades. We found that a higher percentage of this nursing home's residents sustained falls which led to serious injury.