Fernhill Estates

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our nursing grade. Our nursing rating analyzes the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the number of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility Oregon in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a policy of turning a patient more often.

This facility truly excelled in the category of short-term care, where we gave it a score of A-. Very few facilities performed more favorably in this area. Our short-term care ratings are meaningful for residents in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a broad range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients that who were able to eventually return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

This facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned a grade of B+. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. Our inspection ratings weigh a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this area typically have few severe deficiencies. Sadly, this facility was assessed a category L deficiency, which is not what we expected based on its inspection grade. This category indicates inspectors identified a widespread deficiency putting resident health or safety in imminent danger. In spite of this major red flag, other aspects of this facility's inspection report gave us some hope.

The next area we assessed is long-term care. This nursing home was awarded an above average long-term care grade in our assessment, with a grade of B-. While this was not as strong as several of its other scores, this is still a decent grade for that category. For patients in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 86.82171 percent of its patients. This is multiple points lower than the national average. Nevertheless, this facility keeps its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.