Sage Creek Post-Acute

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our best scores. Arguably the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

In addition, we also would like to point out that this facility was given positive short-term care marks in this assessment. We gave them one of our more favorable scores in that category, with a B+. This proved to be the facility's second strongest score. In calculating these short-term care scores, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our goal is to devise a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. We were not able to track down registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.9 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The third category we assessed was long-term care. This nursing home's received a rock-bottom long-term care score where it received a lowly F. Long-term care scores in this range generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. We weren't able to find information on vaccination rates. To our surprise, this facility was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.

Moving on to our final area, this nursing home really did not perform well. Due to a bottom of the barrel grade of F in nursing, this was this nursing home's poorest area. When calculating a nursing home's nursing score, we assess the amount of time nurses are caring for residents and the levels of training of those nurses. This facility provided just 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing ratings. This place fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.