Highland Oaks

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Unfortunately, it does not appear that we have information on deficiency's for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

An additional quality feature for this facility is that it received an above average long-term care grade. In fact, this turned out to be its second best category score. In that category, we gave this facility a grade of B+. Facilities that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 96.350365 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is higher than most nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility also was awarded a favorable short-term care grade. Indeed, we awarded it an above average grade of B+ in this category. In computing our short-term care grades, we size up the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This rating is generally a useful measure of the facility's rehabilitation. Unfortunately, we were not able to find information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The last category we assessed is nursing. This facility was given an impressive nursing score in our assessment, with a grade of B. Although this is not as good as some of its other category grades, this is still one of our stronger grades for this category. There are a host of subcategories included in this area. Most of the factors reflect levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some quality-based measures in this category. This nursing home fared well in some of the quality measures we looked at. For example, in terms of the number of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, this nursing home performed better than the national average. This is generally an indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided with better nursing care.