Falcon Lake Nursing Home

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this place also excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned an A. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. Our inspection grades are tied to several datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

This facility's short-term care rating turns out to be one of its better features. The nursing home was given a B- in this category. In computing our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This area is considered to be a meaningful measure of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. We looked at the qualifications of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time those nurses were with patients, in determining our rating in this category. This nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a low total compared to most facilities. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics. While this facility got docked a bit for its nursing hours, it excelled in some of these quality measures. With less than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it did remarkably well in this subcategory. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a policy of moving a patient more frequently.

Turning to our fourth category, this nursing home was awarded a C for long-term care, which is generally a respectable grade. With our long-term care category, we look at the quantity of services provided by a facility, as well as a series of quality metrics. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. We were pleased to discover that this nursing home vaccinates 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. This place keeps its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.