Community Springs Healthcare Facility

The primary reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it received an excellent inspection score. In fact, its inspection score was far superior to its overall grade. In our inspections category, we gave it a grade of A+. Arguably the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. We weren't able to find deficiency counts for this nursing home. We wish we had more data for this nursing home. Without having access to deficiency data, it is difficult to evaluate it in this area.

This nursing home's next most favorable area was short-term care. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the pack score in this area. Our short-term care scores are meaningful for patients needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires additional highly-skilled nursing. This includes a wide spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the average facility. The hope is always that this does not adversely impact the quality of care. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. We found that 4.8 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below average.

This nursing home's second lowest score is long-term care, where it received a grade of just D in that area. This is a well below average grade. If you are looking for services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care ratings. After we finished looking at the volume of care provided by nurses, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were optimistic to discover that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this facility also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

The final area we graded was nursing, which proved to be this nursing home's least impressive area. It received a lowly F for this category, which is clearly concerning. Nursing scores are based largely on levels of nurse staffing. 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 performing poorly in terms of nursing hours, this place also had rock bottom marks in the quality-based metrics we looked at in determining our nursing ratings. For starters, we looked at the percent of patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home was at more than twice the national average in both of these metrics.