Horizon Care Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Inspection ratings are tied to many datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This place was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This indicates that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to be an immediate risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

This nursing home also was given a strong score in our long-term care category. We gave this nursing home an above average grade of B+ in that area. For residents in need of a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 87.66627 percent of its patients. This is a bit lower than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, we were pleased to find nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

As it turns out, this nursing home only received a grade of D for its short-term care grade, which is not one of our better scores. Our short-term care scores are probably more meaningful for patients requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more skilled nursing services. This includes not just nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Given its poor score in this area, we were not shocked to discover that this nursing home offered far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Turning to the next area, this nursing home really did not fare well. With a poor grade of F in nursing, this is this facility's weakest grade. Our nursing score analyzes several components, but the paramount one is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provides 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. This facility also had abysmal marks in some of the quality-based measures to pair with its weak nursing hours. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and we were quite disappointed. This facility was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this metric. This is a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores could be avoided with better nursing care. This statistic helped pull down this nursing home's nursing score quite a bit.