Elkhart Oaks Care Center

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are quite minor. Sadly, this nursing home received a category L deficiency, which was not what we expected given its inspection score. These are the worst type of deficiencies. This category of deficiency indicates the government inspectors found a widespread deficiency putting patient health or safety in imminent danger. Even a single serious deficiency of this nature should be taken seriously. While other aspects of this nursing home's inspection report were favorable, we have some reservations.

Another one of this nursing home's more favorable category scores came in the area of long-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a B. It actually outpaced most nursing homes in this category. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in this category tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure residents are well cared for. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 98.85058 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

We also gave this facility a decent score in the category of short-term care, where we awarded it a C. In determining our short-term care scores, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The goal is to create a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Unfortunately, this place was below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. The question is whether this adversely affected quality of care. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

Switching gears to the next category, this facility really did not fare very well. Due to an abysmal grade of F in nursing, this is its poorest category. When calculating a facility's nursing score, we assess the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients and the levels of training of the nurses. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is not a very impressive figure. On top of being below average in nursing hours per resident, this place also had poor scores in the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This nursing home was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in both of these metrics. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These statistics helped pull down this nursing home's nursing rating quite a bit.