Carmel Health & Living Community

The primary reason this nursing home received a decent overall grade is its impeccable health inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our higher scores in that area, with an A-. This is a much better grade than the facility's overall grade, which was decent but not in the elite range. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This facility received 8 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent risk 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 rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this facility a grade of B-. There are several factors included in this grade. Many of the criteria reflect staffing levels. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, nursing grades also consider quality-based measures, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this place performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally an indicator that a facility has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses to assist its patients.

Moving on to the area of long-term care, this facility was given just a D in this category. When nursing homes receive this type of score in this category it is a bad sign for patient care and it may indicate that the place is not as well-staffed with nurses and aids. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. Frankly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this facility vaccinated 74.73684 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is significantly less than average. To our surprise, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has less hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.

Moving on to our next area, we awarded this nursing home a D for short-term care. This is the facility's least impressive category score. Short-term care grades are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a wide range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. With a score of this caliber for this area, we were not shocked to find that this facility was below average in multiple staffing areas we assess. The facility offered far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most nursing homes. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 4.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.