Amberwood Care Centre

Although we did not rate this nursing home highly overall, we want to point out its excellent government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. These inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This means the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home's next best category was its short-term care score, where it was awarded a grade of B-. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To have good rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than a typical facility. The hope is that this does not adversely impact the quality of care. The last datapoint we considered in this category is the number of patients that returned home from the facility. We found that it performed much better in this metric with 56.8 percent of its patients returning home. For most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

Among this nursing home's several poor grades was its F in the area of nursing care. Our nursing rating assesses quite a few factors, many of which are based on nursing hours. This particular nursing home provided 3.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is below average. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this place also didn't perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This place had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average nursing home. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these scores hurt this nursing home's nursing grade significantly.

Switching gears to the final category, this facility didn't fare very well in this area either. With a rock bottom grade of F in long-term care, this is about as terrible as it gets. If you are looking for services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care ratings. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Fortunately, this facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is a very respectable total. To our surprise, this facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.71 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.