Red Cliffs Health and Rehab

While we were not high on this nursing home overall, we awarded it a B- for our inspections rating. This grade is better than this facility's overall grade. Inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

This nursing home actually received a decent grade in the area of nursing as well. We awarded it a grade of B- for that category, which is not a bad score. Our nursing grade is primarily tied to a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This facility provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, nursing ratings also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this place actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally a good indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses to assist its residents.

We also awarded this nursing home a middle of the pack score in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a B-. Short-term care grades are often employed to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services In order to have highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. We found that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It supplied fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. It is still important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. The last item we assessed in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 5.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is below average.

The final area we assessed was long-term care, which was a weak link for this nursing home. We gave this nursing home a D for our long-term care category. For prospective patients looking for a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are very important. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than many nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.