Golden Living Center-Mishawaka

While this nursing home's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually really excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some can be relatively minor. While this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

Included in this nursing home's host of rock-bottom grades was its F in the area of short-term care. Short-term care ratings are critical for residents looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a vast spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Considering its grade in this area, we were not surprised to learn that this place was well below average in terms of the number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the data we assessed. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 5.1 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The third category we graded was long-term care. This nursing home's was given a bottom of the barrel long-term care grade where it was given an F. Facilities that don't fare well in long-term care typically are not as well-staffed and are lagging in some of the areas of routine personal care we assessed. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. Frankly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this facility vaccinated 77.14286 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which happens to be several points lower than what we expected. To our surprise, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.

The final category we graded is nursing. We gave it a lowly F for this area, which is a very poor grade. Our nursing grade features numerous data points. The most heavily weighted one is the number of hours nurses spend with residents. With just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day, this facility's nurse staffing levels were well below the national average. To go along with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this nursing home also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This nursing home had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average nursing home.