Shady Oak Nursing and Rehabilitation

In addition to receiving a great overall score, this facility also earned first-rate health inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our better grades in this area, with a grade of A. Inspection scores are based on pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors did not 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.

We also awarded this facility a grade of A for our long-term care score. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. After we finished assessing the volume of nursing care, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a life threatening illness for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The next area we graded was short-term care. Unfortunately, we gave this facility a below average grade in the category of short-term care, where it received a D. In the category of short-term care, we attempt to assess indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. Unfortunately, we discovered that this nursing home provides fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The final category we assessed was nursing, ended up being this nursing home's least impressive area. We gave this facility a D in that area. This really was one of the couple of dings on a quality report card. The nursing grade includes many data points. The most heavily weighted one is the number of hours nurses spent with patients. This facility averaged only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is an alarmingly low total. Although this nursing home's nursing hours were below average, it surprised us in a few of the qualitative data points in this category. In particular, we were pleased to find that its residents appear to be experiencing fewer pressure ulcers than the national average.