Highlands Health and Rehabilitation Center

While this facility's overall grade was terrible, it didn't perform quite as poorly in the area of long-term care. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B- for that area, which isn't bad. This wasn't enough to salvage its otherwise weak profile. In the category of long-term care, we focus more on the amount of care offered by a nursing home, as opposed to more medically-intensive services. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. We discovered that this nursing home gave the vaccine to a relatively low 43.856335 percent of its residents, which is several points lower than we expected. Nevertheless, this place keeps its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. In determining our nursing ratings, we analyze both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of those nurses. This facility provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a much lower figure than we were hoping for. Lastly, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics. Although this facility got docked a bit for nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of these quality metrics. With less than five percent of its residents experiencing pressure ulcers, it fared well in this metric. This is typically a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of turning a resident more often.

We awarded this facility a grade of just D for our short-term care rating. This is well below average in this category. In computing these short-term care grades, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to formulate a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. With its grade in this area, we weren't surprised to learn that this place is well below average in terms of its number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the figures we assessed. Frankly, this was what we expected to find. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 4.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.

Unfortunately, this nursing home did not receive a favorable inspection score. We gave it just a just D in this category. Inspection scores relate to a facility's inspections. We weight poor inspection ratings heavily in our assessment. Since government inspection reports are completed by independent inspectors, we consider this data to be very reliable. Inspection ratings account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. Generally, you should be especially cautious when considering a facility that has severe deficiencies on a recent inspection report. This particular facility was assessed 4 deficiencies by CMS. The only positive thing we can say is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they posed a threat to resident safety or health. Finally, we also need to point out that this place received significant government fines amounting to over $100,000. This typically indicates that a bad performance spanned several years.