University Care Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Our inspection grades are based on many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This place was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies an immediate threat to patient health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category. Nursing grades are largely tied to a facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics 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 nursing home the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of turning residents more often.

Turning to our next area, this facility also earned a score of B+ for its short-term care rating. This is a well above average score in this area. In the area of short-term care, we endeavor to evaluate measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last metric we considered in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 5.3 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

The final category we looked at is long-term care, where this facility was given a grade of B. Although this proved to be its least impressive category score, this is still a strong score. When facilities receive this type of score in this category it is typically a good sign for resident care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. After we finished looking at the volume of nursing care, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a dangerous health condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.