Forest Ridge Health & Rehab

Even though we graded this facility incredibly poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable short-term care score this year. We gave it a C in that area, which was the closest thing to a bright spot we found for this place. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to judge a facility's rehabilitation services. To offer highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The tricky part is determining what bearing this had on the quality of care. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. 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 nursing home's second best category was inspections. Nevertheless, with a grade of just D in this category, it still fared relatively poorly. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. We recommend you scrutinize the level of severity of those deficiencies. This particular facility was assessed several deficiencies in categories G through L, which rank among the more serious deficiencies. These categories indicate that the deficiencies uncovered by inspectors had potential to pose actual harm to patients. Finally, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility was assessed large government fines recently amounting to over $100,000. This typically indicates that a nursing home'spoor track record spanned more than one year.

Additionally, we gave this nursing home an F in the category of long-term care. For prospective patients looking for a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Fortunately, this nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is an above average statistic. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

Moving on to the final category, this facility really didn't perform very well here either. With a poor grade of F in nursing, this is really as terrible as it gets. The nursing score includes a handful of components, but the main consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. With a meager 0.2 hours of nursing care per patient each day, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were well below the national average. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing scores. This nursing home performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.