Apple Ridge Care Center

While we were not high on this nursing home's overall grade, it received a very impressive inspection report this year. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it earned one of our highest grades in that category with an A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be quite minor. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

We also gave this nursing home a middle of the pack score in the area of long-term care, where we awarded it a B-. Our long-term care ratings are meaningful for people needing personal care. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. We were pleased to learn that this facility vaccinated 98.14815 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Lastly, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Unfortunately, this facility's next best category was short-term care. Nevertheless, with a D in this area, it still fared somewhat poorly. In computing our short-term care ratings, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to create a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Given its score in this category, we weren't stunned to find that this place was well below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. Frankly, this was what we expected to find. Finally, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The next area we rated is nursing, in which this nursing home was given an abysmal grade here as well. Sadly, it received an F for this area, which is definitely somewhat alarming. Our nursing rating is based on many factors, many of which are associated with quantities of nurse staffing. This nursing home offered a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is an alarmingly low total. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This facility had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these statistics hurt this nursing home's nursing rating quite a bit.