Colonial Park Care Center

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a B+ for our inspections category. This was due to the nursing home receiving a decent government inspection report this year. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This means the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

This nursing home also didn't fare terribly in the category of long-term care. In fact, we gave it a C for that category, which turned out to be another one of its higher scores. In the category of long-term care, we focus on the quantity of services provided by a facility, rather than more healthcare-oriented services. One of the datapoints we considered on top of nurse's aid hours is vaccines. Thankfully, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. Finally, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Another unfortunate development is the F this facility received in the category of short-term care. Our short-term care grades are presumably most important for residents needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Given its weak score in this category, we weren't surprised to discover this nursing home provided significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most nursing homes. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 4.2 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The final category we scored is nursing, where this facility was given a rock bottom grade here as well. It received an abysmal F for this area, which is obviously a major disappointment. The nursing grade features several subcategories. The most heavily weighted one is the quantity of hours nurses spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This facility had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these metrics hurt this facility's nursing rating significantly.