Hi-Line Retirement Center

Neither this place's overall grade nor its category grades gave us much to write home about. Its best category was long-term care, but even there it received a grade of just D. This is still a well below average score. Facilities that do not fare well in this category often don't provide as much nursing care and also may be lagging in a few of the areas of routine healthcare services we assessed. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. We found that this nursing home vaccinated just 81.94444 percent of its residents, which is quite a bit lower than we expected. Surprisingly, this nursing home actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. This proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of D. Our nursing score is based on the facility's level of nurse staffing. We factor in both the levels of training of the nurses and the quantity of hours spent with residents. This facility averaged a meager 0.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. This place fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

The next area we assessed is short-term care. This nursing home's received an abysmal short-term care grade where it was given a lowly F. In computing our short-term care scores, we scrutinize a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This rating is more often than not a useful assessment of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. As you might expect, we found that this place offers far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the typical facility. The final item we looked at in this area is the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its residents returning home.

The final category we assessed was inspections. This facility did not receive positive government inspections in recent years. As a result, we gave it an F here. With facilities that received this poor of an inspection rating, we would scrutinize any severe deficiencies on its inspection report. This particular facility was hit with 4 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they posed a risk to resident safety or health. Lastly, this nursing home was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. This is generally a really bad sign. We would never recommend this facility.