Oakdale Care Center

Although we were not high on this facility overall, we gave it a grade of B- for inspections. This grade is more respectable than the place's overall score. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are quite minor. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

This facilities next best category was short-term care. We gave it a B- in this category. This is essentially a slightly below average score in this area. Short-term care grades are generally used to grade a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The last item we considered in this category is the number of residents that eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This facility's next best area turned out to be its long-term care score, where it was awarded a grade of B-. For long-term care residents, the primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is more than the vast majority of nursing homes. This place was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The last category we scored is nursing, where this nursing home was given a bottom of the barrel grade in this area also. We gave it an F for this category, which is definitely very concerning. In calculating a nursing home's nursing score, we weigh the number of hours nurses commit to patients and the skill levels of those nurses. With a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below average. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this place had really bad scores in many of the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing scores. For starters, we looked at the percent of residents experiencing falls leading to major injury. This nursing home was at more than 1.5 times the national average in this statistic. This is quite concerning in light of the fact that many falls could likely be prevented with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the facility's fate of earning a poor nursing rating.