The Four Ferns

1. Every regulation HIQA judged on an inspection earns points: Compliant 100, Substantially compliant 65, Not compliant 25.
2. Where the compliance plan rates the risk of a failing regulation, orange (moderate risk) takes off 15 more points and red (high risk) takes off 40. Yellow (low risk) takes off nothing.
3. An inspection's score is the average over the regulations it looked at.
4. A home's score combines its last 3 inspections: the newest counts for 50%, the one before for 30% and the one before that for 20%. With fewer inspections the weights are scaled up to 100%.
5. The trend compares the newest inspection's score with the average of the earlier ones: 5 points or more higher is improving, 5 or more lower is declining, anything else is stable.
6. Homes are ranked by score within their county and among scored homes within 25 km. Homes with the same score share a rank.

Method v1. It uses only HIQA's published judgments, not our opinion, and is recalculated whenever a new report is published.