Imboden Creek Living Center

In addition to being a strong nursing home overall, this facility really excelled in our inspections category, where it received an A-. Few facilities fared better in this area. Inspection grades are based on many datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this area have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this place had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

An additional strong feature for this nursing home is that it received a very positive long-term care score. In fact, this proved to be its second best category score. In that category, we gave this nursing home a B+. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 99.55157 percent of its patients, which is very impressive. Pneumonia tragically can be a life threatening condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home does not leave this to chance. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. This facility didn't perform quite as well in this category as it did in some other categories. Nevertheless, this is still a respectable score. Our nursing rating focuses on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of skill of those nurses and the amount of time spent with residents. This place provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a lower figure than we were hoping for. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics. While this facility got dinged a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it excelled in a few of these quality measures. With fewer than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it fared remarkably well in this subcategory. This is often an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a system of moving a resident even once per day.

Turning to the fourth area, this nursing home was awarded a decent short-term care score of B-. In computing our short-term care grades, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our purpose is to create a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this nursing home. The last datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.