Fountainview Center for Alzheimer

This facility received a strong overall grade as described above, but we especially would like to emphasize its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We gave them an A+ in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite insignificant. While this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility really excelled in the area of long-term care, where we awarded it a score of A-. Not many nursing homes performed more favorably in this area. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is much higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of B-. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. Our nursing rating features a number of subcategories. The most important variable is the amount of time nurses spend with residents. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, while this nursing home got dinged a bit for its nursing hours, it actually excelled in some of our quality-based measures. With less than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it did well in this metric.

This nursing home's worst area was short-term care, which is the last area we assessed. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F in this category. In spite of some excellent scores in other areas, this score is nevertheless a bit disappointing so we wanted to make sure you are aware. Our short-term care ratings are based on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a broad range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other forms of therapy. It appears that this nursing home was below average in several staffing areas we looked at. The facility supplied fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who returned home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 2.3 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was well below the national average.