Emerald Ridge Rehab and Care Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was not bad, it really excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A+ for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Our inspection scores weigh several factors found on a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this category generally have very few of these severe deficiencies. This facility was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple of minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This facility received its second best category score in the category of long-term care. We gave this nursing home a grade of B- in this area, which is a respectable grade. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. As it turns out, this nursing home vaccinated only 90.09009 percent of its patients, which is several points lower than we expected. Nevertheless, this nursing home was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We gave this nursing home a grade of just D for our short-term care grade. This is well below average in this category. Short-term care grades are critical for patients seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a vast scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Based on its poor score in this category, we weren't stunned to learn that this place provided significantly fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most other nursing homes. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients that returned home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.6 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.

Switching gears to our final category, this nursing home did not fare very well. Due to a rock bottom grade of F in nursing, this is this facility's worst grade. We analyzed the skill-level of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses were with patients, in determining our rating in this category. With just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, this place's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below average. To pair with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this place also didn't perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This place had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average nursing home. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These scores hurt this facility's nursing rating quite a bit.