Sunlife Care

Not every facility gets an Inspection Grade. The Inspection Grade is a proprietary Assisted Living Magazine score, and we publish one only when the public record is strong enough to be fair — to the facility and to the families reading it. A facility has to clear all four of these:

• A real inspection history

  At least two inspections on record. Facilities graded from state inspection reports also need at least three reports from the past five years, so one old visit can't define a facility.

• Signal in the scored categories

  A grade needs usable data in at least one category — Severity, Citations, Enforcement, or Persistence. CMS-certified nursing homes carry federal records for all four, so we require at least three of them before grading one.

• Data we can actually stand behind

  Each category is weighed by how trustworthy its source is: federal CMS records count fully, while state records and reports read by our AI count for less. A facility whose record is essentially empty isn't graded at all.

• A higher bar for a damaging grade

  A low grade (C- or below) is held back unless the underlying record is strong enough to defend. A wrong low grade harms a real facility and misleads families, so it takes more certainty to publish one than a favorable grade.

A missing grade is not a bad grade. It reflects what we can verify — not the facility's quality. Newer providers, and those in states that publish little inspection data, often don't have enough public record yet.

Grades change as the record does. We recalculate as new inspection reports are published and verified, so many of these assisted living residences will earn a grade once there's enough on file.