Diamond Ridge Health and Rehabilitation Center

We awarded this facility one of our better grades in the area of short-term care, where it earned an A. This is much better than the facility's overall score, which was decent but not in the elite range. In crafting these short-term care ratings, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The goal is to devise a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 6 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This facility also excelled in the category of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Nursing scores are mostly associated with a facility's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a policy of moving residents more often.

The next category we graded was long-term care, where this facility received a B- in this area. Our long-term care ratings are based on the nursing home's amount of nursing care. This means a broad range of personal care services, ranging from assistance with activities of daily living to routine medical services. One of the criteria we considered after nurse's aid hours was vaccines. Thankfully, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. This facility also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Turning our final category of inspections, we gave this facility just a D. This turned out to be this nursing home's worst grade and it really pulled its overall grade down. Our inspection score is based on the facility's inspections. Since the information is collected by government inspectors, we weight it heavily in overall grade. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. We would scrutinize the severity of the deficiencies. This particular nursing home was hit with 5 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we found is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they caused a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, we also would like to point out that this nursing home was assessed significant government fines recently exceeding $50,000. This typically suggests that government inspectors grew tired after several years of failed inspections.