Cheney Care Center

While we were not high on this nursing home overall, we gave it an A- for our short-term care rating. In computing our short-term care ratings, we look at a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This area is considered to be a useful assessment of a facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last statistic we considered in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 6.6 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

This nursing home actually received a decent grade in the area of nursing as well. We awarded it a grade of C for that category, which is not a bad score. Nursing scores are mostly tied to the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures. While this facility got dinged a bit for nursing hours, it actually excelled in a few of these quality-based measures. With fewer than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed well in this statistic. This is often a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of turning patients even once per day.

Unfortunately, this facility received a lowly F for its inspection grade. This is an important category. Scores in this range typically mean we found some red flags on the facility's government inspections. You should pay close attention to any deficiencies on a facility's inspection reports when it receives this poor of an inspection rating. We suggest you pay close attention to the level of severity of those deficiencies. This facility had 10 deficiencies by CMS. The only positive thing we found is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they posed a threat to resident safety or health. Finally, we would like to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home was assessed large government fines recently amounting to more than $100,000. This generally suggests that a poor performance has been an issue for more than one year.

The last category we scored is long-term care. This facility received a rock bottom grade of F in that area. For residents seeking a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Fortunately, this nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is a very solid total. Surprisingly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.