North Central Care Center

Although this nursing home's overall score was terrible, it actually didn't perform as poorly in nursing. In fact, we gave it a B- for that area. The nursing score includes quite a few subcategories, however, the most important consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This place provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a lower figure than we were hoping for. Finally, nursing scores also factor in quality-based measures, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this facility performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally a good indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a facility supplies enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

Remarkably, we gave this nursing home a B- for its short-term care score, which isn't a bad grade. In the category of short-term care, we seek to qualify indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The final item we looked at in this area is the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that just 4.7 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This facility received an F for its inspection rating. This is a particularly important category. Grades in this range often mean we found some red flags on the nursing home's inspection reports. We would advise paying special attention to any deficiencies on a facility's inspection reports when it receives this bad of an inspection rating. We recommend you scrutinize the severity of those deficiencies. This particular nursing home was hit with one category G through L deficiency, which are among the more serious categories of deficiencies. These categories indicate that the deficiencies uncovered by the government inspectors had the potential to pose actual harm to patients. On top of having severe deficiencies, this facility was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We would not recommend this facility under any circumstance.

Turning to the final category, this nursing home really did not perform well here either. With a rock bottom grade of F in long-term care, this is about as as uninspiring as it gets. If you are seeking services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care grades. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Fortunately, this facility vaccinated 98.139534 percent of its residents, which is a very solid percentage. Surprisingly, this nursing home also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.