Towne House Retirement Community

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are relatively insignificant. This facility was assessed 7 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that CMS didn't consider any of these deficiencies an immediate risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This high end facility also performed well in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A+. Only a small group of nursing homes performed better in this area. Short-term care scores are meaningful for people requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing. This includes a broad scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility 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. The last metric we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 6.1 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. In determining a nursing home's nursing rating, we weigh the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of training of the nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In the last area, this nursing home also received a very strong long-term care score, with an A. This rounded out an elusive straight A profile. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find this facility's vaccination rates. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.