Bear Creek Nursing Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Inspection grades are tied to pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also fared very well in the area of long-term care, where it received a score of A. Not many nursing homes fared better in this area. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care typically provide patients with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 93.91892 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B for its nursing rating. This is a well above average score in this category. The nursing score weighs several datapoints, but the main consideration is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a system of moving patients even once per day.

The final category we looked at is short-term care. This facility was given a better than average nursing score in our assessment, with a B. Even though this is not nearly as impressive as several of its other grades, this is still one of the better grades for this category. In calculating our short-term care scores, we scrutinize the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This score is considered to be a useful assessment of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final statistic we looked at in this area is the number of residents who eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that 4.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.