Life Care Center of Fort Wayne

The main reason this ended up being a decent nursing home is that it earned an elite inspection score. In fact, its inspection grade was far better than its overall score. In the inspections category, we gave it an A+. Our inspection ratings are based on several pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this area typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This nursing home was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem 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 awarded a positive score in our long-term care category. We gave this facility a better than average grade of B+ in this category. Facilities that receive this kind of score in long-term care tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure residents are kept in good health. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 97.35973 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia tragically can be a life threatening illness for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility does not take any chances. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

We gave this facility just a D for our short-term care score. This is not a score to write home about. With our short-term care grade, we try to forge a meaningful barometer for rehabilitation services. In this process, we analyze the facility's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Given its grade in this category, we were not stunned to discover that this facility was well below average in terms of the number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the metrics we looked at. Frankly, this was about what we expected here. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.

Turning to the next category, this nursing home didn't fare very well. Due to a bottom of the barrel grade of F in nursing, this was this facility's weakest category. Our nursing rating consists of several factors, however, the main consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provided a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. This nursing home also had terrible scores in some of the quality-based metrics to go along with its low nursing hour totals. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and we were quite disappointed. This facility was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this statistic.