7 Best Nursing Homes In The Country
Anyone who has ever seen those chilling exposes on substandard nursing homes knows that these facilities can vary greatly in quality. While the bad ones tend to get most of the attention, the ones you want to know about are the best ones. Here are the 7 best nursing homes in the country as well as what it takes to make the list.
Health Inspections
The criteria for the list of best nursing homes in the country begin with how well nursing homes do with regards to health inspections. This general title of health actually refers to over 180 questions pertaining to health issues that surveyors check. Everything from the food preparation to the efficacy of infection control protocols is assessed.
Other various areas of patient care that are assessed are patient rights, medication administration, quality of life, and even the skin care of patients. These inspections happen every year or so and contribute to the list of the best nursing homes. Because these inspections cover so many different aspects of life and safety at nursing homes, they are some of the best indicators for the quality of these nursing homes.
Nurse Staffing
This criterion refers not only to the quality of the nursing staff but also to the number of nursing employees at a nursing home. Nursing homes submit information concerning how many registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, licensed vocational nurses, and nurse health aides are employed at the time of the report as well as how much time each one worked. The information that specifically goes into determining which homes make the list is how much time each patient gets from the nursing staff on any given day.
The number of patients in the nursing home is matched up with the amount of time that the nurse staffing worked and the average amount of time of nursing care that each patient received is calculated. The best nurses in the world cannot provide adequate much less exceptional care if there are not enough of them to match the patient load. The bare minimum per patient time for a five star rating was 33 minutes.
Quality Measures
This is a category that is harder to pin down. It involves information collected on Medicare and Medicaid patients. There are 19 different indicators that must be tracked although of these 19 only 10 are used. These 10 are considered the most reliable indicators of these quality measures so they are the ones that are used to further assist in compiling the list.
The 7 Best Nursing Homes
The nursing homes that follow are the 7 best. They are the ones that scored best on the measurements listed above. Keep in mind that these are objective criteria but they can never replace you visiting a nursing home and investigating the circumstances up close for yourself. But this list is still a place to start.
- Bethany Skilled Nursing Facility in Framingham, Mass.
- Central Virginia Training Center in Lynchburg, Va.
- Cokesbury Village in Hockessin, Del.
- Dooley Center in Atchison, Kan.
- Hannah B.G. Shaw Home for the Aged in Middleboro, Mass.
- Home of the Innocents in Louisville, Ky.
- Jeanne Jugan Residence in Newark, Del.
T. Rheinecker writes about how to enroll in LVN to BSN programs.