Crystal Heights Care Center

While we were not high on this nursing home overall, we awarded it an A- for our inspections rating. This score is significantly more impressive than the facility's overall grade. Inspection grades account for a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. You generally want to avoid places with a bunch of deficiencies flagged. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home actually received a decent grade in the area of nursing as well. We awarded it a grade of C for that category, which is not a bad score. Our nursing grade is mostly associated with the facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides only 0.2 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a somewhat uninspiring figure as it is well below average. Lastly, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is often a good indicator that a facility has quality controls in place.

We awarded this nursing home just a D for our short-term care rating. This is not a score to write home about. Short-term care ratings are vital for patients needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates additional skilled nursing. This includes a vast scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. With a grade in this range in this area, we weren't shocked to discover this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing metrics we assess. The nursing home supplied significantly fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most other facilities. Finally, we assessed the number of residents that returned home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

The last category we scored is long-term care, was this facility's least impressive area. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in that category. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 93.84615 percent of its residents. This is a few points less than we anticipated but still a respectable figure. To our surprise, this place actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.