Bear Creek Center

Although we did not rate this facility well overall, we want to point out its decent grade of B- in the category of nursing. The nursing grade is based on quite a few factors, but the primary consideration is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This place provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a much lower figure than we were hoping for. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures. Although this nursing home got docked a bit for its nursing hours, it actually excelled in a few of these quality measures. With less than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it did remarkably well in this metric. This is often a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of moving a resident at least once a day.

This facility's next most favorable category is its short-term care score, where it received a B-. In determining our short-term care scores, we look at a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is frequently a meaningful assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. Unfortunately, we found that this facility provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The tricky part is determining what effect this had on quality of care. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

This nursing home earned mediocre government inspections in recent years. We awarded them a grade of C in this area. Inspection grades are based on many datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important thing to look for on these inspections. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to the well being of residents. To our surprise, this nursing home had a category J through K deficiency, which are some of the worst possible categories of deficiencies. This typically indicates inspectors identified a deficiency which placed patient health or safety in imminent jeopardy. In addition to having severe deficiencies, this nursing home was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. This is generally a really bad sign. We would never recommend this facility.

Switching gears to the next area, this nursing home was awarded an acceptable long-term care grade of C. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 87.81094 percent of its patients. This is quite a bit below average. Fortunately, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.