Cascades at Riverwalk

In addition to being a quality facility overall, this facility really excelled in the category of short-term care, where it received an A. Our short-term care ratings are probably more meaningful for residents requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not only nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.8 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Another strong feature for this nursing home was inspections, where it earned a B in that category. It performed better than most facilities in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite minor. This facility was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to create an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. There are many subcategories included in this area. Most of these datapoints are tied to nurse staffing. This place averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident each day, which is well below average. Finally, nursing scores also factor in quality-based metrics, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this facility performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is typically a good indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls can be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

Our next area is long-term care, in which we awarded this facility a grade of C in this area. Our long-term care grade assesses a nursing home's personal care rather than the skilled nursing and medical services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 99.31271 percent of its residents, which is more than the average nursing home. Lastly, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.