Chehalem Health & Rehab

This nursing home received a solid overall grade as described above, but it really excelled in the area of nursing care, with an impressive grade of A- in this category. In computing a facility's nursing grade, we assess the quantity of hours nurses are seeing patients and the skill levels of the nurses. This facility provided 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

We also gave this facility a strong grade in short-term care. This facility received a B+ in this category, which is one of our more favorable scores. Short-term care grades are commonly used to assess a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to offer highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we considered in this area is the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that 4.7 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This facility's third best category grade came in the area of government inspections. In that category, we gave this nursing home a B. It actually outperformed most facilities in this category. Inspection grades are based on several datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this area tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Unfortunately, this facility was assessed a category L deficiency, which was not what we expected given its inspection rating. This category means CMS discovered a widespread deficiency placing resident safety or health in immediate danger. In spite of this major red flag, other aspects of this facility's inspection report gave us some hope.

The final category we assessed is long-term care. We awarded it a grade of C in that area. This is a decent grade in this area. In determining our long-term care grades, we look at the assistance with daily living received by a nursing home's residents. Once we assessed the amount of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. We were pleased to find that this nursing home vaccinates 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Lastly, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.