WASHINGTON — U.S. News & World Report, publisher of Best Hospitals and Best Children’s Hospitals, has released its Best Nursing Homes 2015, highlighting the top nursing homes in every state and nearly 100 major metropolitan areas. The ratings cover almost 16,000 nursing homes nationwide and are freely available.
Now in its seventh year, Best Nursing Homes is designed to help people who will spend at least some time in a nursing home in 2015 rehabbing after a hospital stay or as long-term residents. On a given day, 1.4 million people, most of them 65 and older, live in nursing homes, according to the publisher.
Best Nursing Homes provides data and information on care, safety, health inspections, staffing and more for nearly all U.S. nursing homes. A searchable database lets users find highly rated nursing homes by distance as well as by location. Each facility’s profile displays health and fire safety violations, performance in important clinical categories and how much time nursing staff spends with residents.
To create the rankings, U.S. News drew on data from Nursing Home Compare, a program run by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the federal agency that sets and enforces standards for nursing homes. U.S. News awarded a “Best Nursing Homes” designation to facilities that earned the agency’s highest overall rating of five stars. California has the greatest number of five-star nursing homes, followed by Ohio, Florida, Illinois and Texas.
In the new ratings, the share of nursing homes with an overall rating of five stars decreased to 21.7 percent, down from 24.9 percent last year. The decrease is the result of recent changes implemented by CMS late last month to bolster the federal rating system. Due to the changes, only nursing homes that received an overall rating of 5 stars as of Feb. 19, 2015, will have a 2015 badge displayed on their profile page.
Click here to visit Best Nursing Homes 2015.