Ponderosa Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

Unfortunately, we didn't have any favorable things to say about this nursing home's overall grade or its category grades. Its best category was long-term care. Nevertheless, with a grade of D in this area, it still performed poorly. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 97.60766 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is better than the vast majority of nursing homes. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

Sadly, this facility's second highest score is short-term care. However, with a grade of D in this area, it still performed relatively badly. In our short-term care grade, we attempt to craft a sound barometer for rehabilitation. In doing so, we look at the facility's levels of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. With a grade of this caliber for this area, we weren't stunned to learn this facility was below average in two of the key staffing areas we looked at. The facility offered substantially fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most facilities. The final statistic we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 5.2 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics was damning for this nursing home's short-term care score.

We were stunned to find that this facility also excelled in the area of nursing. In fact, we gave it an impressive grade of D for that category, which is one of our best grades. The nursing score features a variety of subcategories. The most important variable is the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients. This nursing home averaged a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This statistic is significantly below average. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing ratings. This facility performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

Turning to our final category of inspections, this facility received a grade that's as bad as it gets. We weight this category more heavily than our other categories. When a nursing home has this bad of an inspection grade, you should expect some severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to patient safety. This facility was assessed 6 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they caused a risk to resident safety or health. Lastly, we also want to draw your attention to the fact that this place was assessed large government fines amounting to over $100,000. This typically indicates that a poor track record has been an issue for multiple years.