Evergreen Healthcare Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually really excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we gave it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Our inspection scores are tied to many datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important item to look for on these reports. You should especially avoid facilities with severe deficiencies associated with risks to resident well being. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

Unfortunately, this facility's second highest score is short-term care. Nevertheless, with a grade of D in this category, it still performed relatively poorly. In our short-term care assessment, we endeavor to forge a meaningful measure for rehabilitation services. In this process, we look at the nursing home's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. With its score in this category, we were not surprised to learn that this facility was well below average in terms of the number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the figures we assessed. Finally, we considered the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from this facility. We found that it fared better in this area, with 50.5 percent of its patients returning home.

We also wanted to draw your attention to this facility's poor nursing grade where it received an F. We looked at the licensure of nurses working for the facility, as well as the quantity of hours the nurses worked with patients, in computing our rating in this category. This facility provided just 3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This statistic is quite a bit below average. On top of being below average in nursing hours per resident, this facility also had poor scores in the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in both of these metrics. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. These scores pulled down this nursing home's nursing rating significantly.

The final area we assessed was long-term care. This nursing home was given a poor grade of F in that area. For prospective residents seeking a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are a key measure. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 97.2028 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. Surprisingly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.25 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.