Highbanks Care Center

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it received an A. Few facilities performed better in this area. Our inspection grades are tied to many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this area have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. A couple minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. In that area, we gave this nursing home an C. In calculating a facility's nursing rating, we weigh the amount of time nurses are caring for residents as well as the level of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a somewhat alarming figure which is well below average. Lastly, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based metrics, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically an indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses to assist its residents.

We awarded this facility a grade of just D for our long-term care grade. This is not an impressive grade. Long-term care scores in this range generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. Once we concluded our assessment of the quantity of nursing care, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. We were a bit concerned this nursing home vaccinated just 45.771145 percent of its patients for pneumonia. To our surprise, this nursing home actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.

Turning to our final category, we awarded this facility a grade of D for the area of short-term care. This was the facility's least impressive category score. Short-term care grades are based on the nursing home's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a wide spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Based on its grade in this area, we were not surprised to find that this facility is well below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its patients based on the metrics we looked at. Honestly, this was what we expected here. The final metric we assessed in this area is the number of residents that ultimately returned home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its residents returning home.