Deer Lodge

Although we graded this nursing home extremely poorly overall, it received a somewhat respectable nursing grade this year. We gave it a C in this category. Nursing scores are tied to nurse staffing levels. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this place actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally an indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place.

Sadly, this facility's second best category was inspections, but even there it received a D. This is still a well below average grade. Inspection grades factor in many items on the facility's recent inspection reports. When you see too many deficiencies on the reports, this is generally a bad sign. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to resident safety. This nursing home was assessed 6 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we found is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they posed a threat to resident safety or health. Lastly, we also want to point out that this facility was assessed significant government fines recently of over $100,000. This usually signifies that a bad performance spanned multiple years.

This facility ended up receiving a a very poor grade in our short-term care category. It received an F in this area. Short-term care ratings are critical for individuals looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a broad spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Not surprisingly, we learned that this nursing home provides far less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the typical facility. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 3.8 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.

The last area we rated was long-term care, in which this nursing home received a rock bottom grade here as well. Unfortunately, we gave it an F for this category, which is definitely a major concern. Nursing homes that do not fare well in this category often don't provide as much nursing care and also may be struggling in a few of the areas of routine medical care we assessed. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 91.90752 percent of its patients, which is a few points less than we anticipated. Surprisingly, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This was its best score in this category.