Blackhawk Life Care Center

On top of being a great nursing home overall, it also earned A+ health inspections recently. Its inspections were virtually flawless. These inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you CMS did not deem 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.

We also would like to emphasize the fact that this facility was given an elite score of A in our short-term care category. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This grade is considered to be a reliable assessment of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from this facility. We found that 6.3 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

In addition, this nursing home also was given favorable long-term care scores in our assessment. Indeed, we gave them one of our higher scores in that category, with a score of B+. Facilities that excel in this category typically provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The final area we graded is nursing. This facility was awarded a very good nursing score in our assessment, with a B. Although this was not quite as strong as some of its other scores, this is nevertheless one of the stronger grades in that category. When determining a facility's nursing rating, we look at the quantity of hours nurses are with patients and the level of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics 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 nursing home the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a policy of moving a patient more frequently.