Glacier Care Center

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this facility performed at an even higher level in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite minor. While this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

This facility is also above average in the area of short-term care, where it received a score of B+. It performed better than most facilities in this area. Our short-term care scores are presumably more meaningful for people requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. We weighed the levels of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours the nurses were with residents, in computing our score in this area. This facility provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This facility's worst area was long-term care, which is the last category we analyzed. It received a lowly F for this category. Even with a few strong scores in other categories, this grade is still somewhat disappointing so we felt obligated to make sure you are aware. In a long-term care environment, the primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. One of the factors we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccines. Thankfully, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 94.18605 percent of its residents. Surprisingly, this place also keeps its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.