Highland Rehabilitation & Health Care Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B- for that category, which is one of our better scores. Inspection ratings weigh a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. This place received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This indicates that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies an immediate threat to patient health or safety. Finally, CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

Incredibly, we gave this nursing home a B- for our long-term care grade, which is not too bad of a score. For patients seeking a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are an important measure. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this facility vaccinated 56.23679 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is quite a bit below average. On a more positive note, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next category we looked at was short-term care. This facility's received an unfortunate short-term care grade where it was given an F. Our short-term care grades are presumably more important for patients in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically utilizes more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. As you might expect, we learned that this facility provides significantly less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the typical facility. The last metric we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics was damning for this nursing home's short-term care grade.

The final area we graded was nursing. This facility was given a rock bottom grade of F in this area. There are a host of subcategories included in this area. Many of the factors are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This facility offered just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is well below average. Unfortunately, this place also had abysmal scores in some of the quality-based metrics to go along with its weak nursing hour totals. We looked at the percentage of patients suffering pressure ulcers and we were quite disappointed. This place was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this measure. This is likely a bad sign in light of the fact that so many pressure ulcers are preventable with better nursing care. This statistic helped pull down this facility's nursing grade significantly.