Lost Creek Rehabilitation and Nursing Center

We would like to point out that this nursing home's inspection score exceeded its overall grade. This facility earned a B+ in this category, which is one of our better grades. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Unfortunately, we were not able to find information on deficiency's for this nursing home. Without having complete deficiency data for this facility, it was challenging to really grade the place in terms of this category.

In addition, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B+ in our short-term care category. This happens to be one of our higher grades. Our short-term care grade is often employed to grade a facility's rehabilitation services. To provide highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we considered in this area is the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of C. Our nursing score looks at the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of training of the nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This place provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home surprisingly excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In fact, it scored well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the quantity of hours of care offered.

The last area we looked at is long-term care, which is this facility's least impressive category. We awarded this facility a D in that area. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 97.5 percent of its patients, which is better than the average nursing home. To our surprise, this place was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.