Oakcrest Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

Although we graded this nursing home incredibly poorly overall, it received a relatively impressive inspection report this year. As a result, it earned one of our better scores in that area with a grade of B. Arguably the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. It is typically in your best interest to avoid facilities that have a long list of severe deficiencies. This place was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This means that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

Unfortunately, this facility's next best score was long-term care. Nevertheless, with a D in this category, it still fared relatively poorly. In a long-term care environment, the primary objective 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. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is higher than most nursing homes. Surprisingly, this place also keeps its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

We awarded this facility a grade of just D for our short-term care score. This is not a very good score. Our short-term care ratings are meaningful for individuals seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a wide scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Given its grade in this area, we weren't stunned to discover that this place was well below average in terms of the number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its patients based on the measures we looked at. Frankly, this was what we expected here. The final statistic we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics doomed this facility's short-term care score.

The next category we scored was nursing, where this facility received a poor score in this category also. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F in this area, which is definitely a major disappointment. Our nursing grade analyzes the facility's level of nurse staffing. We factor in both the levels of licensure of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with patients. This place offered only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. Lastly, we also looked at some quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place was above average in two of the areas we focus on, with solid marks for avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.