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. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. 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 66.27907 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is slightly less than we anticipated but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The third area we looked at is short-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a C. Our short-term care scores are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a wide range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. In this place's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the average facility. The hope is that this does not adversely impact the quality of care. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

The final category we graded is nursing, which ended up being this facility's least impressive area. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F in this category, which is clearly very disappointing. The nursing score includes a number of subcategories. The most important factor is the quantity of hours nurses spent with patients. This place averaged a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing scores. This place performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.