North Crest Living Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was not bad, it really fared well in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our highest scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively insignificant. While this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

We also gave this facility an impressive grade in long-term care. This nursing home earned a B in this category, which turns out to be one of our more impressive grades. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Moving on to another strength for this facility, it also earned an elite nursing score. In fact, we gave this facility an impressive grade of D. There are quite a few factors included in this category. Most of these subcategories reflect levels of nurse staffing. This place offered just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

The final area we rated is short-term care. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F in this category, which is a rock bottom score. This is certainly a significant disappointment. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To offer highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. With a grade of this caliber in this area, we weren't stunned to discover that this place was well below average in multiple staffing areas we assess. In fact, it provided significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other nursing homes. The last metric we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 4.4 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was quite a bit below average.