Hickory Creek at Huntington

The primary reason this facility received a decent overall grade is its excellent health inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of A+. This is a much better grade than the facility's overall grade, which was decent but not in the elite range. Inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

In addition, we gave this nursing home a B+ in our long-term care category. This is one of our better scores. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a deadly illness for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home does not roll the dice on this issue. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The third category we analyzed was short-term care, where this nursing home was given a grade of C in this area. Our short-term care scores are critical for people requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a wide scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

This facility's weakest area is nursing, which is the final category we looked at. In this area, we gave this facility a grade of D. Our nursing rating is largely based on the facility's nurse staffing. This place provided only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is an alarmingly low total. In addition to its subpar nursing hour totals, this nursing home also earned suboptimal scores in several of the quality-based measures we considered in computing our nursing grades. We found that a higher percentage of this facility's patients experienced falls which led to major injury.