Village North Retirement and Health Center

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this facility really excelled in the category of inspections, where it received an A. Few facilities performed better in this category. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

This facility also was awarded a positive short-term care score. Indeed, we awarded them a B+ in this area, which happens to be one of our better. Our short-term care scores are probably more critical for those needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. It does not appear that this facility submitted registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The final measure we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 6.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The next category we graded is long-term care. In that area, we awarded this facility a solid grade of C. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. Candidly, we were a bit concerned this nursing home vaccinated 48.387096 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is quite a bit lower than the national average. Nevertheless, this nursing home was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The final category we scored was nursing, which was this facility's worst category. We gave this facility a D in that category. Unfortunately, this grade hurt the nursing home's overall grade a bit. Our nursing grade focuses on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We factor in both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This particular facility averaged a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This statistic is significantly below the national average. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This place had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these scores pulled down this nursing home's nursing rating significantly.