Oak Trace

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Arguably the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. You really can not do much better than a deficiency-free inspection report.

This first-rate nursing home also fared very well in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A+. Only a small group of facilities performed better in this category. In determining our short-term care scores, we scrutinize a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This grade is considered to be a useful measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients that were able to return home from this facility. We found that 6.1 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A- in our nursing category. There are several subcategories included in this grade. Many of these subcategories are tied to nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of turning residents more frequently.

The next area we assessed was long-term care, in which this nursing home received a B-. This actually was this facility's least impressive area. This is nevertheless a middle of the pack score. For residents in need of a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. After assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination record. It does not look like this nursing home provided data regarding vaccinations. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.