Glacier Care Center

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it received a grade of A. Few facilities performed better in this category. Inspection ratings account for several factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with better grades in this area usually have very few of these severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

In addition, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B+ in our nursing category. This is one of our better grades. Our nursing rating is largely based on a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a policy of moving a resident more often.

This facility's next highest category turned out to be its short-term care grade, where it was given a B-. Our short-term care grades are probably more important for people in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more skilled nursing. This means not merely nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who returned home from the facility. We found that just 4.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.

The next area we rated was long-term care, which was this nursing home's weakest category. We gave it a lowly F in this area, which is clearly a major concern. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 91.954025 percent of its residents. This is a few points less than we anticipated but still a respectable percentage. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This is its best feature in this category.