Evergreen Healthcare Center

While we were fairly low on this nursing home overall, we awarded it an A+ for our inspections rating. This score is significantly more impressive than the facility's overall grade. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

We awarded this nursing home just a D for our long-term care rating and that actually ended up being its next highest category. In a long-term care environment, the 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. One of the criteria we considered after nursing hours was vaccines. Thankfully, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.

Sadly, we gave this facility an F for its short-term care score. Short-term care ratings are vital for patients requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a wide spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. With a grade in this range in this area, we weren't shocked to learn this place was well below average in many staffing metrics we focus on. The facility supplied far fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most nursing homes. Finally, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This definitely was not a strength for this facility. We found that just 3.9 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.

The last area we looked at is nursing. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this category, which is a rock bottom score. Our nursing category assesses several data points, most of which are based on nursing hours. This particular place provided a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This figure is well below the national average. This place also had abysmal marks in some of the quality-based metrics to pair with its weak nursing hour totals. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and we were disappointed. This place was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in this measure.