The Springs Minecreek

This nursing home received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its excellent health inspection reports in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This facility received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to resident health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

In addition, we awarded this facility a B+ in our long-term care category. This happens to be one of our more favorable scores. Facilities that excel in this category typically provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. Once we concluded our assessment of the quantity of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a dangerous condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility doesn't take any chances. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home's nursing grade appears to be one of its better features. The facility received a grade of C in this category. When determining a nursing home's nursing score, we assess the quantity of hours nurses are caring for patients and the levels of training of the nurses. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In fact, it performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

The last category we scored is short-term care, ended up being this facility's weakest category. We awarded this facility a D in this area. This really was one of just a few weak points in an otherwise impressive report card. Our short-term care scores are meaningful for patients looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a broad scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, about half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.