Elk Haven Nursing Home

To pair with its decent overall score, we gave this facility an A+ for its inspection grade. This grade is far better than the facility's overall rating. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

This facility also received a strong grade in our long-term care category. We awarded this facility a better than average grade of B+ in that category. When facilities receive this type of grade in long-term care it is usually a good sign for patient care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a deadly health condition for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't take any chances. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Our third area we graded was short-term care, in which this facility received an F. In calculating our short-term care scores, we assess a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This category is typically a fair assessment of a facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Given its grade in this area, we weren't surprised to find that this nursing home is well below average in terms of the number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. Honestly, this was what we expected to find. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, about half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.

The next category we rated is nursing, which proved to be this nursing home's least impressive area. Sadly, it received a lowly F in this area, which is obviously very concerning. When determining a facility's nursing grade, we consider the number of hours nurses spend with patients and the levels of training of those nurses. This facility offered just 0.1 hours of nursing care per patient per day. In addition to being below average in nursing hours per resident, this place also had poor marks in the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This place was at about 1.5 times the national average in both of these metrics. This is a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. These metrics pulled down this nursing home's nursing grade significantly.