Ranchwood Nursing Center

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a grade of C for our nursing rating. Nursing grades are mostly associated with the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This facility averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is not an impressive total. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures. While this facility got docked a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it excelled in a few of these quality-based metrics. With fewer than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it did remarkably well in this metric. This is often an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of moving a resident more often.

As it turns out, this facility only earned a D for its long-term care rating, which happens to be one of its higher category grades. When facilities receive this kind of score in this category it is typically a bad sign for patient care and it may indicate that the facility is not as well-staffed. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 91.70985 percent of its residents. This is a few points lower than we anticipated but still a decent percentage. Surprisingly, this facility actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.

We wanted to point out this place's inspection rating where it received an F. With nursing homes that received this bad of an inspection grade, we recommend scrutinizing the severe deficiencies on its inspection report. This nursing home was hit with 2 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they caused a risk to resident health or safety. Finally, we also need to point out that this nursing home was assessed significant government fines recently totaling over $100,000. This often indicates that a facility's poor performance has been an issue for more than one year.

Turning to the last area, this facility did not perform very well in this area either. Due to a very poor grade of F in short-term care, this is really as as uninspiring as it gets. Our short-term care scores are vital for people needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a wide range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The final statistic we looked at in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.9 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics was damning for this facility's short-term care grade.