Skyline Nursing Center

This nursing home actually performed well in long-term care. We awarded it a grade of B for that area. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 97.58065 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We were also surprised to find that this facility received a decent nursing grade this year. We gave it a grade of C in that category. Nursing scores are primarily associated with a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This place provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a somewhat alarming figure as it is well below the national average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place actually fared better in some of the quality measures we assessed. It performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the number of hours of care offered.

We wanted to point out that this nursing home received an F for its inspection grade. An F in this category is particularly troublesome because it typically points to red flags on the nursing home's government inspections. For places with poor inspection ratings, you should scrutinize any severe deficiencies found on their inspection reports. This particular facility had a category G through L deficiency, which rank among the more serious deficiencies. These categories indicate that the deficiencies uncovered by CMS had potential to create actual harm to residents. Lastly, we also want to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received large government fines recently totaling over $100,000. This generally indicates that a facility's bad performance has been an issue for more than one year.

The last category we scored was short-term care. This facility was given a very poor grade of F in this area. With our short-term care grade, we strive to craft a fair barometer for rehabilitation. In this process, we analyze the facility's scope of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Considering its abysmal rating in this area, we were not stunned to find that this place offered significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other nursing homes. The last measure we considered in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics sunk this facility's short-term care score.