Crestpark Helena

On top of being a first rate facility overall, this facility also excelled in nursing, where it received an A. Our nursing grade focuses on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of training of the nurses and the number of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home also received a strong short-term care grade. Indeed, this is this facility's second most impressive category score. In that category, we awarded this facility a score of A-. Short-term care grades are typically employed to score a facility's rehabilitation services. To provide highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Another impressive feature of this nursing home is its inspection rating. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a score of A-. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some can be relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

The final category we rated is long-term care. We gave this nursing home one of our higher scores in this category, with a grade of B. Even though this is not as favorable as many of its other scores, it is still a positive score. Facilities that do well in long-term care tend to provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. After we finished assessing the quantity of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is often a dangerous illness for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.