Golden Living Center-Sycamore Village

Golden Living Center-Sycamore Village is an average-sized nursing home located in Kokomo, Indiana. Featuring an overall score of D, this is a relatively poor nursing home. This nursing home has very little going for it. Despite all this, one of the few highlights of this nursing home's report card is its impressive inspection score. You can scroll down to learn more about inspections and other category grades

While this nursing home's overall score was not a highlight, it actually really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A- for that category, which is one of our best scores. Our inspection grades are tied to many pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key item to look for on these reports. You should especially avoid nursing homes that have severe deficiencies associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. This turned out to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this facility a grade of B-. There are many factors within this category. Most of these datapoints reflect nurse staffing. This nursing home provided just 3 hours of nursing care per patient per day, which is a relatively low figure. Nevertheless, more than a quarter of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the most highly trained levels of nurses. This is a high percentage of skilled nursing care, which we weight more heavily in our nursing grades. Lastly, we also considered some quality-based metrics in this category. While this place did not rank well in terms of its nursing hours per resident, it performed much better in some of the quality measures we looked at. By way of illustration, in terms of the percentage of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, this place fared better than the national average. This is typically an indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided with better nursing care.

This nursing home's third best category ended up being its short-term care grade, where it was awarded a grade of C. Our short-term care scores are based in part on a facility's quantity of skilled nursing services. This includes a wide scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. One of this nursing home's strengths is registered nurse hours. We found that it offers more care from registered nurses to its residents than most facilities. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 36.9 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this place is below average.

The last area we scored was long-term care. We gave it an F for this area, which is a poor score. In a long-term care setting, the primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 98.4985 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 1.3 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.