Oaks Nursing Center

To go along with its relatively modest overall grade, we gave this nursing home an A+ for its inspection grade. This grade is far better than the facility's overall score. Arguably the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Additionally, we gave this facility a B+ in our long-term care category. This is one of our more impressive scores. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. After we finished looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a life threatening condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our higher scores in that area with a F. We looked at the qualifications of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of time the nurses worked with patients, in computing our score in this area. This place provided a meager 0.2 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing scores. This facility performed well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.

This nursing home's least impressive area is short-term care, which is the last category we looked at. It received a lowly F for this category. Despite multiple respectable scores in other areas, this grade is nevertheless of a concern so we wanted to make a note of it. Our short-term care grade is generally used to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To provide good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. It appears that this facility was subpar in two of the key staffing areas we assessed. It offered fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most facilities. The last metric we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.9 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics doomed this nursing home's short-term care grade.