Ballenger Creek Center

In addition to being a quality nursing home overall, this nursing home really excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A-. Not many facilities performed better in this area. Inspection grades are based on items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was given a favorable short-term care grade. Indeed, we gave it an above average score of B+ in this area. With our short-term care category, we endeavor to create a fair gauge for rehabilitation services. In this process, we analyze the facility's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final item we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 5.7 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

This facility is also strong in the category of long-term care, where it received a score of B+. It outpaced most facilities in this category. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. After considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 99.022804 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The final area we analyzed is nursing. In this category, we awarded this facility an acceptable grade of B-. This proved to be this nursing home's weakest category. Our nursing rating includes several subcategories, however, the paramount consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This place averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily, which is well below average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place actually excelled in some of the quality measures we assessed. It performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.