Oaktree Healthcare

With an overall grade this high, it should come as no surprise that this facility excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned a grade of A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively insignificant. While this place had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Contributing to its strong assessment, this facility also was awarded an excellent long-term care grade, with a score of A. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in this category it generally means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia tragically can be a dangerous health condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Additionally, this facility also was awarded favorable short-term care scores in our assessment. Indeed, we gave it one of our higher grades in that area, with a score of B+. With our short-term care score, we endeavor to forge a meaningful barometer for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we look at a facility's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The final area we scored was nursing. This facility was awarded an above average nursing score this year, with a B. While this wasn't nearly as elite as a few of its other grades, this remains one of our more favorable scores for this area. In computing a nursing home's nursing grade, we consider the quantity of hours nurses commit to patients and the skill levels of those nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.