Molalla Manor Care Center

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category. Our nursing grade analyzes many components, but the primary consideration is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Among its many impressive scores, this nursing home received a strong short-term care score. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in this category. Short-term care grades are often used to judge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To provide highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Turning to our inspection category, this nursing home excelled in that area, which is based on the nursing home's recent inspection reports. In fact, we gave it an A- for that category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively minor. While this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few relatively minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

The last category we looked at was long-term care, in which this facility was given a grade of B. Believe it or not, this turned out to be this nursing home's weakest area. A facility could be doing a lot worse when it's worst score still beats out most other nursing homes. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.