Columbus Alzheimer's Care Center

Although we didn't rate this nursing home favorably overall, we actually gave it an excellent grade in the area of inspections, where it earned a grade of A-. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively minor. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you CMS didn't 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 necessarily the end of the world.

This facility received its second highest category grade in the category of long-term care. We awarded this facility a grade of B- in this area, which is a reasonably acceptable grade. For prospective patients looking for a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are very important. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 99.184784 percent of its patients. This place was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Sadly, this facility only received a grade of D for its short-term care rating, which is not a score to write home about. Short-term care grades are commonly used to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation To offer quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. With a score in this range for this category, we were not shocked to discover that this place was below average in multiple staffing figures we looked at. The nursing home supplied significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who eventually returned home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

The next area we looked at was nursing, which turned out to be a weak link for this nursing home. We gave this facility a grade of D in the area of nursing. There are a variety of subcategories within this category. Most of the data points reflect levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing ratings. This facility performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these data points to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.