Hickory Creek at Columbus

This nursing home's best category grade came in the category of inspections. In this area, we gave this nursing home a grade of B+. It actually outperformed most facilities in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite minor. Although this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

Another one of this facility's more favorable category scores came in the category of long-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B+. It actually performed better than most nursing homes in this area. For long-term care residents, the primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 83.62069 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which happens to be slightly lower than we anticipated but still a decent percentage. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, we were pleased to find facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The third most favorable category we awarded this facility in any category came in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a C. Our short-term care ratings are based in part on the facility's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a vast scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. We found that this place was below average in the two key staffing areas we focus on. The facility offered fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The final metric we assessed in this area is the number of residents that were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.

The last area we looked at was nursing, which turned out to be a low point for this nursing home. We gave this nursing home a D in the area of nursing. The nursing score analyzes many subcategories, however, the primary one is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing scores. This facility performed well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these metrics to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care.