Golden Years Nursing Center

In addition to earning a great overall grade, this nursing home performed even better in our inspections category which is associated with the facility's recent inspections. We awarded it an A for this category, which is one of our highest scores. Inspection grades account for a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher grades in this area tend to have few of these severe deficiencies. While this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home was given strong marks in the area of long-term care as well. Consequently, we awarded it one of our highest grades in that area with a area of A-. For long-term care residents, the primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 90.625 percent of its patients. This is somewhat less than we were hoping for. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, at least this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. There are several subcategories within this area. Most of these subcategories relate to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home 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 frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning patients even once per day.

The final category we looked at is short-term care, in which this nursing home received a grade of B-. Although this proved to be its weakest category grade, this is nevertheless not the end of the world. Short-term care grades are based on a facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a vast spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually quite a bit below average.