Golden Living Center-Mishawaka

While we didn't give this nursing home a good overall grade, we actually gave it a relatively strong grade in the category of inspections, where it received a B+. Inspection ratings account for several factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. You should avoid nursing homes with a list of severe deficiencies flagged. 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.

We also want to point out that this facility received a decent grade in our nursing category. We awarded it a grade of C in the area. Nursing scores are largely associated with the nursing home's nurse staffing. This facility provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a much lower figure than we were hoping for. Lastly, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based metrics, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this place actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is usually an indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls can be avoided if a facility supplies enough nurses to assist its residents.

We gave this facility a grade of just D for our long-term care grade. This is not an impressive grade. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means the facility did not perform well in our quality measures relating to resident care. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. Candidly, we were a bit alarmed this nursing home vaccinated 72.72727 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which happens to be significantly less than average. To our surprise, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. This was its best score in this category.

The next area we assessed was short-term care. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this category, which is an abysmal score. Short-term care ratings are based in part on the facility's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a wide scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other variations of therapy. With a score of this caliber for this area, we weren't stunned to discover that this facility was below average in two of the key staffing areas we assess. In fact, it provided significantly fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.