Graham Oaks Care Center

To pair with its relatively modest overall score, we awarded this facility a grade of A for its inspection grade. This grade is far more impressive than the facility's overall grade. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This facility was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to be an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

Additionally, we also wanted to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home was awarded positive long-term care marks this year. We gave them one of our better scores in that category, with a B+. This turned out to be the facility's second best score. When nursing homes receive this kind of grade in long-term care it is typically a good sign for patient care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 97.30942 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home received a strong nursing rating as well. It earned one of our higher grades in that category with a F. The nursing grade includes a host of subcategories. The most important one is the number of hours nurses spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing ratings. This nursing home fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we graded is short-term care. Unfortunately, we gave it an F in this category, which is a bottom of the barrel score. This is certainly a significant disappointment. Our short-term care grades are based in part on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a broad range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. As you might expect, we found that this place offers substantially less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average nursing home. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.