Pine Creek Care Center

In addition to earning a strong overall score, this facility also received an elite short-term care grade. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with an A-. Our short-term care grades are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a vast range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. We weren't able to locate information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Finally, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

In addition, this nursing home also excelled in inspections, where it earned a grade of A-. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively minor. This nursing home was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies to create an immediate threat to patient health or safety. A few relatively minor deficiencies are not necessarily something to panic about.

This nursing home received a favorable long-term care grade as well. We awarded it one of our better scores in that area with a grade of B. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia tragically can be a dangerous illness for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next area we graded is nursing, in which this nursing home was given a grade of B-. This actually turned out to be this nursing home's worst area. This is nevertheless not a poor grade. In determining our nursing ratings, we assess both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of those nurses. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Although this nursing home ranked poorly in terms of the quantity of nursing care offered, it actually performed admirably in some of our quality measures. It was above average in two of the subcategories we look at, with positive reviews for minimizing its patients' major falls and pressure ulcers. These areas are indicators of the quality of nursing care offered since many falls and bed sores are preventable.