Homestead Healthcare Center

Sadly, we gave this nursing home some extremely bad category grades. This includes an F for its inspection score. This is an especially important area. Grades in this range generally point to some red flags on the nursing home's inspection reports. When a facility has this poor of an inspection rating, you should expect some severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to patient safety. This particular nursing home was assessed one category G through L deficiency, which rank among the more serious deficiencies. This generally indicates that the deficiencies found by inspectors had potential to pose actual harm to residents. Finally, we would like to point out that this nursing home was assessed large government fines recently totaling over $100,000. This usually signifies that a poor track record spanned more than one year.

We also wanted to point out this facility's poor long-term care grade where it was given an F. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. As it turns out, this nursing home gave the vaccine to a relatively low 64.28571 percent of its residents, which is somewhat alarming. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.

Among this nursing home's several poor grades was its F in the area of nursing care. Nursing grades are tied to nurse staffing levels. This facility averaged a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is well below average. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing ratings. This facility fared well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be measures of the quality of nursing care.

Turning to our final category, this nursing home didn't fare well in this area either. With a very poor grade of F in short-term care, this is just about as terrible as it gets. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to have good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The final measure we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who ultimately returned home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 4.5 percent of its residents returning home.