Carmel Hills Nursing and Rehab

While we graded this nursing home extremely poorly overall, it earned a more respectable long-term care score this year. We gave it a C in that area, which is the closest thing to a bright spot we could find for this facility. Long-term care grades are often used to assess a nursing home's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing on the skilled nursing services offered by a rehabilitation facility. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 78.83959 percent of its patients. This is many points less than the national average. Nevertheless, this nursing home keeps its patients 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.

Sadly, this facility's second best category was inspections, but even there it received a grade of just D. This is still a well below average grade. One of the most important factors in assessing an inspection report is deficiencies. We would pay close attention to the severity of the deficiencies. This facility was assessed 4 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they posed a risk to resident safety or health. Lastly, this nursing home was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. This is generally a really bad sign. We would never recommend this facility.

This nursing home wound up receiving a rock-bottom grade in our short-term care area. It was given an F in this area. In crafting these short-term care ratings, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to formulate a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. With its abysmal rating in this category, we weren't shocked to learn this facility provided substantially fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most other facilities. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who returned home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

Turning to our fourth category, this facility did not fare very well here either. Due to a poor grade of F in nursing, this is really as as uninspiring as it gets. In determining our nursing grades, we look at both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This place offered just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. On top of its below average nursing hour totals, this nursing home earned suboptimal marks in several of the quality-based measures we considered in computing our nursing grades. We found that more of this facility's residents suffered falls leading to serious injury. We would argue that many falls could be prevented with better nursing care. This statistic contributed to this nursing home receiving a terrible nursing rating.