Spring House Estates

One of the many reasons this ended up being a great nursing home is that it earned an A+ inspection grade. This is just about as good as it gets in this very important category. Our inspection grades weigh a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher grades in this category usually have very few severe deficiencies. Although this place had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also received an A+ for its short-term care score. In calculating our short-term care scores, we analyze the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is typically a meaningful assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. The last item we looked at in this area is the number of patients who eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that 6.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Moving on our next area, we gave this facility a score of A for our long-term care rating. This is a first-rate score. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 95.652176 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In our last category, this facility also was given an impressive nursing score, with a grade of A-. This wrapped up a straight A profile. The nursing score analyzes many components, however, the most important consideration is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these metrics as good measures of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.