Presbyterian Village of Homer

Although we did not rate this facility highly overall, we want to draw your attention to its nearly flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively insignificant. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. Not having any deficiencies is this facility's greatest accomplishment.

This facility also was given a positive grade in our long-term care category. We gave this facility an above average grade of B in that category. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. After looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 96.49123 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility's next best category was nursing, but even there it received a grade of just D. This is still a well below average grade. Our nursing rating assesses the facility's level of nurse staffing. We factor in both the levels of licensure of those nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing scores. This nursing home fared well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these datapoints to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.

Turning to the fourth area, this nursing home did not perform very well in this category either. Due to an abysmal grade of F in short-term care, this is just about as as uninspiring as it gets. Short-term care grades are generally employed to grade a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Based on its score in this area, we were not surprised to discover that this facility is well below average in terms of the number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. Frankly, this was what we expected here. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4.4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.