Shady Oaks Healthcare Center

While this facility'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. These inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another one of this facility's better category scores was in the category of long-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B+. It actually outpaced most facilities in this area. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. One of the factors we considered after nursing hours is vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. This is a reliable method to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facilities next most favorable category is short-term care. We gave it a C in this area. This is basically a middle of the road score in this area. In the area of short-term care, we endeavor to qualify indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We analyze a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 4.1 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was actually well below the national average.

This nursing home's weakest category was nursing, which is the final category we scored. We gave it an abysmal F in this area. Even with several acceptable scores in other areas, this score is nevertheless alarming so we would like to to draw your attention to it. We looked at the skill-level of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the number of hours the nurses spent with residents, in calculating our rating in this category. This facility provided only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this nursing home also didn't perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing grades. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average nursing home. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These scores pulled down this nursing home's nursing rating quite a bit.