Columbus Oaks Healthcare Community

This nursing home earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its excellent government inspection reports in recent years. We gave them an A- in this category. Our inspection scores account for a host of factors included in a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better scores in this area generally have very few of these severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

Additionally, we also wanted to point out that this facility was given positive long-term care marks this year. We awarded them one of our more favorable grades in this category, with a grade of B+. This turned out to be the nursing home's second strongest grade. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. After assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

We gave this facility just a D for our short-term care rating. This is not an impressive grade. Short-term care grades are generally employed to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services In order to provide highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. With a score of this caliber in this category, we were not surprised to find that this place was below average in many staffing metrics we looked at. The facility offered far fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most facilities. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 5 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The last category we analyzed is nursing. It received an F for this category, which is a poor score. This is certainly a major concern. Nursing ratings are based in large part on quantity of nursing care available. 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. In addition to rating below average in nursing hours per resident, this place also had poor scores in the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This nursing home was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in both of these statistics. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These statistics pulled down this facility's nursing grade significantly.