Overall Nursing Home Rating by State
When searching for a nursing home for a loved one the quality of the facility is of prime importance. As such, it’s critical to understand the ratings of these long-term care facilities. In this article, we will focus on the overall ratings of nursing homes in each state, taking a birds-eye view of the picture.
Overall Rating by State
Figure 1: Map of Overall Rating by State
Figure 1 shows that Hawaii is the leading state in terms of nursing home quality with an overall rating of 4.07. The next two leading states are Alaska and Delaware with 3.94 and 3.93, respectively. On the other end of the spectrum, Louisiana has the lowest rating with 2.47, followed by Georgia and Texas. From the graph above, it is clear that the West has higher-quality nursing homes as compared to the South.
Figure 2: Overall Rating by State Histogram
The majority of states’ overall rating falls between the range of 3.00 - 3.75. The graph in Figure 2 follows a bell-shaped curve and is slightly skewed to the left. Thus, it follows a relatively normal distribution. However, do these ratings have anything to do with the number of nursing homes?
The Number of Nursing Homes
Echoing what we found in the second figure, we see that the majority of nursing home ratings are concentrated around 3.2 to 3.4. The graph below shows that most states have an overall rating between 3.35 and 3.45, and the total number of nursing homes in such states is less than 150. It is also clear from the plot that the states with a lower number of facilities tend to score better than the ones with a larger number. However, California is an exception to this rule because its average nursing home rating is 3.47, but it has a total of 1184 facilities.
Figure 3: The Overall Rating and the Number of Nursing Homes per State
For the Future...
We can see from the graphs above that California has a wide range of possibilities with a strong overall rating. However, this is merely a broad overview of the ratings. It's worth noting, though, that the picture may change from county to county, and even city to city.
By Rosetta Hu