Eureka Nursing Center

This facility earned a strong overall grade as described above, but we wanted to emphasize its excellent long-term care rating. We gave them a grade of A in this category. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In addition, this facility received top notch government inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our better grades in that area, with an A. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this category typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of C. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but a grade in this range is not the end of the world. When determining a nursing home's nursing score, we look at the amount of time nurses commit to patients and the level of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, our nursing ratings also consider quality-based metrics, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this nursing home performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is often a good indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls can be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

Moving on to our fourth area, this nursing home did not perform very well. With a bottom of the barrel grade of F in this category, this is obviously its weakest grade. In determining our short-term care scores, we size up a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This category is more often than not a meaningful assessment of the facility's rehabilitation. In this place's case, it looks like it offered fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than a typical facility. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of patients who eventually returned home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 3.8 percent of its residents returning home. Unfortunately, this was quite a bit below average.