Scenic Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

This facility received a quality overall score as described above, but we especially would like to point out its nearly flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Inspection grades account for a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher grades in this area typically have few severe deficiencies. While this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility received strong marks in the category of long-term care as well. In fact, we awarded it one of our strongest scores in that area with a score of A-. Facilities that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 98.63481 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. Our nursing grade includes a handful of subcategories, most of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is a lower figure than we were hoping for. Lastly, nursing scores also factor in quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this facility actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally a good indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls can be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

The last area we assessed was short-term care, turned out to be this facility's least impressive category. We gave this facility a D in that area. This is one of the few dings of an otherwise strong profile. Our short-term care grade is generally used to gauge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. We found that this facility was subpar in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the metrics we looked at. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.9 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.