Carmel Health & Living Community

This nursing home earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A- in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite minor. While this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple of minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an B-. There are a variety of datapoints included in this area. Most of these datapoints are tied to staffing levels. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, nursing ratings also consider quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this place performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is usually a reliable indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

We also gave this facility a solid score in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of B-. Our short-term care ratings are important for residents requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. This means a vast scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, this place was below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. The real question is whether this also affected quality of care. The final item we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.3 percent of this facility's residents returned home. This figure was below the national average.

The final category we graded was long-term care. Unfortunately, we gave it an F for this category, which is an abysmal score. This is clearly a major disappointment. Nursing homes that do not score well in this category often do not provide as much nursing care and also may be lagging in a few of the areas of routine medical care we looked at. After we finished assessing the volume of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. Candidly, we were a bit alarmed this facility vaccinated a relatively low 62.568302 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this facility was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.