University Care Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received a very impressive short-term care score. In fact, short-term care is its best category. In that area, we gave this nursing home an A. In determining our short-term care scores, we assess a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This category is considered to be a reliable assessment of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 6.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Adding to its impressive profile, this facility also performed well in the category of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it earned one of our highest grades in that category with an A-. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this place had some deficiencies on its report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of B-. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. We analyzed the levels of nurses working for the facility, in addition to the quantity of hours the nurses spent with residents, in computing our score in this category. This place provides only 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a somewhat uninspiring figure which is well below average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place fared better in some of the quality measures we looked at. In fact, it performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the number of hours of care provided.

Our last area is long-term care, in which we gave this facility a C in that category. In our long-term care category, we focus more on the amount of services provided by a facility, as well as a series of quality data points. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Fortunately, this nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is a very solid percentage. This place 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 number.