Elderwood at North Creek

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an excellent inspection grade. In fact, its inspection score was far superior to its overall score. In our inspections category, we gave this facility an A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are quite insignificant. This facility was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies an imminent risk to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

Additionally, we gave this facility a grade of B+ in our long-term care category. This is one of our higher scores. Nursing homes that receive this type of score in this category tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are kept in good health. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 98.50746 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Sadly, this nursing home's next best category is short-term care. Nevertheless, with a grade of D in this area, it still fared somewhat poorly. In crafting our short-term care grades, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to devise a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Considering its grade in this category, we were not surprised to learn that this facility was well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the data we assessed. Frankly, this was what we expected to find. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 4.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The next category we scored was nursing. Sadly, it received an abysmal F for this category, which is a rock bottom score. This is clearly a significant concern. We scrutinized the skill-level of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses worked with patients, in computing our rating in this area. With only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were well below average. To go along with its low total nursing hours per patient, this nursing home had really bad scores in many of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing falls which led to serious injury. This facility was at more than 1.5 times the national average in this statistic. This is quite alarming in light of the fact that so many falls could likely be avoided with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the facility's fate of receiving a poor nursing score.