Black Mountain Neuro-Medical Treatment Center

To go along with its favorable overall score, we awarded this facility an A+ for inspections. Inspection ratings are tied to items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This nursing home was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This tells you that the inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to be an imminent threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received an A+ for its nursing grade. Nursing scores are largely based on a facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving patients at least once a day.

We also gave this nursing home a grade of of A+ for its long-term care grade. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 99.80732 percent of its patients, which is significantly higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In the last category we looked at, this facility was awarded a very favorable grade of A in our short-term care category. With this score, the nursing home topped off a straight A report card. In determining our short-term care scores, we size up the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is frequently a fair measure of a facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last item we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.