Stillwater Health Care

Although we did not have many positive things to say about this nursing home's overall score, it earned a respectable government inspection report this year. As a result, it received a decent grade in that category with a B-. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite insignificant. This place was hit with 8 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to create an immediate risk to resident safety or health. Lastly, this nursing home was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. This is generally a really bad sign. We would never recommend this facility.

We awarded this facility a respectable grade in the area of nursing as well, with a grade of B-. Our nursing score is largely based on a nursing home's nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, although this facility got dinged a bit for nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in a few of our quality-based measures. With less than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this statistic.

This nursing home's third most favorable category is short-term care. We gave it a grade of B- in this area. This is essentially a slightly below average score in this area. In calculating our short-term care grades, we analyze the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This grade is generally a reliable assessment of a facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the typical facility. The hope is that this does not adversely affect the quality of care. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return home from this facility. We found that 6.7 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was actually well below average.

Moving on to the fourth category, this facility was awarded a B- in long-term care, which is a respectable grade. Our long-term care scores are more meaningful for people needing more traditional assistance associated with activities of daily living. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 92.21557 percent of its residents, which is a few points below what we were hoping for. Nevertheless, this facility keeps its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.