Oakridge Healthcare Center

Even though we gave this nursing home a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a grade of C for our nursing category. Nursing grades are heavily correlated with nurse staffing levels. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In fact, it scored well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

This facility's next best category is long-term care, but it still earned a grade of just D in that category. This is still a relatively poor score. Facilities that do not fare well in long-term care typically aren't as well-staffed and are lagging in a few of the areas of routine healthcare services we assessed. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. We were a bit worried that this nursing home vaccinated 81.46342 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is quite a few points lower than what we expected. To our surprise, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This was its best score in this category.

Moving on to the area of short-term care, this nursing home was awarded just a D in that area. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to devise a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Not surprisingly, we learned that this facility offers significantly less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than a typical facility. The last item we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics sunk this nursing home's short-term care score.

In our last category of inspections, this nursing home received a horrible grade. We weight this grade more heavily than other categories. With places that received this bad of an inspection score, we recommend scrutinizing the severe deficiencies on its inspection report. This facility was hit with 6 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only favorable thing we found is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they caused a threat to resident 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.