Mission at Alpine Rehabilitation Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was not bad, it really excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A+ for that category, which is one of our best scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are quite insignificant. While this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also performed favorably in the area of long-term care, where we gave it a score of A-. Not many facilities performed more favorably in this area. For prospective residents looking for a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 55.769234 percent of its residents, which is a few points less than we were hoping for. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, at least this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Another strength of this nursing home is its favorable grade in nursing. We gave them one of our better scores in that area, with an impressive grade of D. Our nursing grade includes many subcategories, most of which are tied to nursing hours. With only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day, this facility's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below average. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing scores. This place fared well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these metrics to be measures of the quality of nursing care.

The final category we scored was short-term care. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in short-term care, rendering this its weakest area. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to judge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To have highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The last item we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its residents returning home. This was quite a bit below average.