Emerald North Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

While we were not high on this nursing home's overall grade, it received a very impressive inspection report this year. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with an A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite insignificant. This place was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to create an imminent risk to resident safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

This facilities next best area was short-term care. We gave it a grade of C in this category. This is essentially a slightly below average grade in this area. Our short-term care grade is generally used to score a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. In this place's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than a typical facility. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from this facility. We found that 4.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well below the national average.

We gave this facility a grade of just D for our long-term care rating. This is well below average in this category. Nursing homes that don't fare well in this category typically are not as well-staffed and are lagging in a few of the areas of routine medical care we assessed. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 87.22044 percent of its residents. This is several points less than what we were hoping for. Surprisingly, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This is its best score in this category.

This nursing home's weakest category was nursing, which is the final area we looked at. For this category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of just D. Our nursing score analyzes a handful of factors, most of which are based on nursing hours. This place averaged just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This figure is far below average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing ratings. This facility fared well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.