Snyder Oaks Care Center

This facility's overall grade was propped up by a strong long-term care rating. We gave them one of our better grades in that category, with a B+. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home also performed well in the area of inspections. It received one of our best scores in that category with an B+. Inspection grades weigh several factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better scores in this category generally have few severe deficiencies. This facility was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

Unfortunately, this facility only received a grade of D for its short-term care score, which is not a score to write home about. With our short-term care category, we try to create a fair measure for rehabilitation services. In this process, we assess the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Considering its score in this area, we were not surprised to find that this facility is well below average in terms of the number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its patients based on the data we assessed. Honestly, this was about what we expected here. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This wasn't a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 5.1 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most facilities, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.

Moving on to our fourth area, this facility really did not fare well. With a poor grade of F in nursing, this was this nursing home's worst grade. Our nursing grade consists of quite a few subcategories, most of which are tied to nursing hours. This facility provided just 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. 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 facility had really bad scores in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents having falls which led to serious injury. This place was at more than 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is quite concerning in light of the fact that many falls could likely be prevented with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the facility's fate of earning a poor nursing score.