Northern Oaks Living & Rehabilitation Center

Northern Oaks Living & Rehabilitation Center is in Abilene, Texas. This city has a population of 124,196 people. We gave this nursing home an overall grade of B-. A grade of this caliber requires some respectable marks. Even in a city with 11 nursing homes, this nursing home turns out to be a perfectly acceptable choice. One of the better aspects of this nursing home's report card is its impressive inspection reports, which you can find in the next paragraph.

We want to point out that this facility really outperformed its overall grade in the category of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best grades in this category with a grade of A-. Inspection grades account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher scores in this category usually have very few of these severe deficiencies. While this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few relatively minor deficiencies aren't something to panic about.

This facility also received an impressive score in our short-term care category. We gave this nursing home a better than average grade of B in this category. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we size up the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This score is often a fair measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. One of this facility's strengths is physical therapy hours. We found that it offers at least 50% more hours of physical therapy as most nursing homes. Finally, we looked at the number of residents that eventually returned home from this facility. We found that it fared better than most facilities in this area with 52.9 percent of its residents able to return home.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B-. Our nursing grade is primarily tied to the facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provided just 2.7 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a low total compared with most facilities. Finally, we also considered a few quality-based statistics in this category. While this place didn't rank well in terms of nursing hours per resident, it fared better in some of the quality measures we assessed. By way of illustration, in terms of the number of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, this nursing home performed better than the national average. This is often a good indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented with better nursing care.

Turning to our next category, this facility received a C in long-term care, which is a respectable score. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. After we finished assessing the volume of nursing care, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. We were optimistic to learn that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Unfortunately, this place's hospitalization rate was not quite as favorable. We found that this facility had 2.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days.