Wisteria Place

One of the many reasons this ended up being a great nursing home is it received an A+ inspection grade. This is just about as good as it gets in this category. Inspection grades account for several factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this area tend to have very few of these severe deficiencies. While this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple relatively minor deficiencies aren't something to panic about.

This nursing home performed well in our short-term care category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that area, which is one of our best scores. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to score a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. We were not able to locate information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This nursing home is also strong in the category of long-term care, where it was awarded a grade of B. It performed more favorably than most facilities in this category. Facilities that receive this type of score in this category typically provide consistent around the clock care to ensure patients are kept in good health. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nursing hours is vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a reliable method to minimize unnecessary deaths for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to our final category, this nursing home was awarded a decent nursing rating. Even though this wasn't as good as many of its other category grades, this is truly not a bad grade. The nursing score analyzes a handful of components, however, the most important one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, our nursing scores also factor in some quality-focused metrics. We especially like to look at the percentage of residents who suffered pressure ulcers and major falls. Sometimes these statistics are measures of the quality of nursing care, since superior care can reduce these issues.