Falcon Lake Nursing Home

Although we didn't give this nursing home a good overall grade, we did give it a strong grade in the category of inspections, where it received a B+. Inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

Unfortunately, this facility's next best score was long-term care. Nevertheless, with a D in this area, it still fared somewhat badly. For residents looking for a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. We were pleased to discover that this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. To our surprise, this place also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

This nursing home's second worse category was short-term care, where it earned just a D in that category. This is a relatively poor grade. In calculating our short-term care grades, we analyze the facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This area is generally a reliable assessment of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The last metric we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics was damning for this facility's short-term care score.

The next area we assessed was nursing, was this facility's weakest area. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in this category. We assessed the licensure of nurses at the facility, as well as the quantity of time the nurses worked with residents, in calculating our grade in this category. This place averaged a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing ratings. This nursing home performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these metrics to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care.