Silver Creek Healthcare Center

This facility received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its excellent health inspection reports in recent years. We awarded them an A in this category. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This facility received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to create an immediate threat to resident safety or health. A couple of minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

This nursing home was awarded its second best category grade in the category of short-term care. We gave this nursing home a B- in this category, which is an acceptable score. In determining our short-term care grades, we scrutinize a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This rating is more often than not a solid measure of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than a typical facility. The hope is that this does not adversely affect the quality of care. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

Moving on to the area of long-term care, this facility was given just a D in that area. In a long-term care setting, the primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 95.899055 percent of its residents. Surprisingly, this facility also keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.

The last category we analyzed is nursing, which proved to be this nursing home's least impressive category. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F in this area, which is obviously a major disappointment. In determining a facility's nursing grade, we weigh the number of hours nurses spend with residents as well as the level of skill of the nurses. With a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily, this facility's nurse staffing levels were far below the national average. On top of its subpar nursing hour totals, this nursing home also earned poor marks in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We found that more of this nursing home's residents suffered falls leading to major injury. We believe that many falls could be avoided with better nursing care. This statistic contributed to this nursing home receiving a poor nursing rating.