Elkhart Oaks Care Center

While this place's overall score was as bad as it gets, it fared well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B for that area, which is one of our better scores. Our inspection ratings are tied to datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important item to look for on these reports. Most importantly, you should avoid facilities that have severe deficiencies linked to risks to resident well being. Unfortunately, this facility received a category L deficiency, which is unexpected given its inspection score. This category of deficiency indicates CMS discovered a widespread deficiency placing patient safety or health in imminent jeopardy. Any serious deficiency is a major concern. While other aspects of this nursing home's inspection report were favorable, we have some reservations.

Moving on to the area of long-term care, this facility received a grade of just D in that category. As it turns out, this ended up being its second best grade. For patients seeking a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are very important. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 98.36066 percent of its residents. Unfortunately, this nursing home's hospitalization rate was far less favorable. We found that this nursing home had 2.4 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an alarming rate.

Sadly, this nursing home's third best category is short-term care. As it turns out, with a D in this area, it still fared relatively badly. In the category of short-term care, we seek to qualify indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We assess a facility's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and various therapists. With its grade in this category, we were not stunned to learn that this facility was well below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the figures we looked at. Honestly, this was about what we expected to find. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Switching gears to the last category, this nursing home really didn't perform well here either. With an abysmal grade of F in nursing, this is really as bad as it gets. Our nursing score analyzes quite a few components, but the primary one is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility offered only 3.2 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is an alarmingly low total. This facility also had terrible marks in some of the quality-based measures to go along with its weak nursing hours. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and we were disappointed. This nursing home was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in this measure.