Hickory Creek at Sunset

One of the reasons this ended up being a quality nursing home is that it earned an impressive inspection grade. In fact, inspections is its best category grade. In that category, we gave it a grade of A. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home really excelled in the area of long-term care, where we awarded it a score of A-. Very few facilities performed more favorably in this area. When nursing homes receive this type of score in long-term care it is usually a good sign for patient care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the criteria we considered after nursing hours was vaccines. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a proven method to avoid unnecessary deaths for the senior population. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The third category we analyzed was short-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a grade of B- in this area. Short-term care grades are commonly used to judge a facility's performance with rehabilitation In order to have good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this facility provided information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

Our next category is nursing, in which we awarded this nursing home a grade of C in this area. Our nursing grade includes a variety of factors. The most heavily weighted factor is the amount of time nurses 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 assessed several nursing quality measures. Although this nursing home got docked a bit for nursing hours, it excelled in a few of these quality-based metrics. With less than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed well in this subcategory. This is typically an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving residents more frequently.