Settlers Ridge Care Center

We want to point out that this nursing home earned a much better grade for long-term care than it did overall. we gave it one of our best grades in that category with an impressive grade of A-. Facilities that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. One of the statistics we considered after nursing hours is vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 95 percent of its patients. This is a great way to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Inspections is another category where this nursing home excelled. We awarded this nursing home a grade of B+ for our inspections category. This is far more impressive than its overall grade. Inspection scores are based on several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspections. Places that score well in this category have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we gave this nursing home an F. This is certainly not one of this facility's better areas. The nursing score consists of many components, however, the paramount one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home averaged only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. This place fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these statistics to be measures of the quality of nursing care.

This nursing home's worst area was short-term care, which is the final area we looked at. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this area. In spite of some respectable grades in other categories, this grade is nevertheless of a concern so we felt obligated to point it out. In computing our short-term care scores, we scrutinize a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This grade is frequently a solid measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. Based on its score in this category, we weren't surprised to learn that this nursing home is well below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 3.9 percent of this facility's residents returned home.