Crystal Heights Care Center

This nursing home received a strong overall grade as described above, but we especially would like to point out its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A- in this category. Our inspection grades account for a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher grades in this category generally have very few severe deficiencies. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In addition, this nursing home also was awarded favorable long-term care grades in our assessment. In fact, we gave it one of our stronger grades in that category, with a grade of B+. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in long-term care it is a good sign for patient care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 96.31579 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B+. The nursing rating analyzes a handful of factors, however, the paramount consideration is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next area we scored was short-term care. We gave this facility a grade of D in our short-term care category, making this its least impressive category. Short-term care scores are meaningful for people looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a broad scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, this place was below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the staffing figures we assessed. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This definitely wasn't a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4.2 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.