Pioneer Ridge Retirement Community

To pair with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. In crafting these short-term care scores, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The purpose is to formulate a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from this facility. We found that 6.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This nursing home also was superb in the area of long-term care, where it received a grade of A. Few facilities performed better in this area. Nursing homes that receive this type of score in this category tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are kept in good health. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 90.44586 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which happens to be slightly less than we were hoping for but still a respectable percentage. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We awarded this facility an A for our inspections rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively minor. While this place had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In our final category, this nursing home also was awarded a first-rate nursing score, with a grade of A-. This completed a straight A profile. Our nursing rating focuses on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the amount of time spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some quality-based measures in this category. This nursing home fared well in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. By way of illustration, in terms of the percentage of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, this nursing home performed better than the national average. This is generally an indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented with better nursing care.