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 0.5 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.

Moving on our third area, we gave this facility a score of A for our long-term care rating. This is a superb score. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is far higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In the final category we analyzed, this facility was awarded an impressive grade grade of A- in our short-term care category. With this score, the nursing home topped off a straight A report card. In calculating our short-term care grades, we analyze the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This category is more often than not a solid measure of the facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.