Sunny Acres Nursing Home

While we were not high on this facility overall, we gave it a B- for our inspections rating. This grade is better than this facility's overall grade. We would argue that one of the most critical factors in evaluating an inspection report is deficiencies. In this regard, we especially look at the severity of those deficiencies. While this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

One of this nursing home's higher category grades came in the area of long-term care. This wound up being its second most respectable category. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary goal 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 patients. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 92.30769 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which happens to be somewhat less than we anticipated but still a decent percentage. Fortunately, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility's third highest category was its short-term care score, where it received a C. In calculating these short-term care scores, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to devise a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Unfortunately, this place was below average in terms of its number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. The important question is whether this adversely affected quality of care. The last metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that just 4.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.

The last category we looked at is nursing, which was a weak link for this nursing home. We gave this nursing home a D for the area of nursing. Nursing ratings are based in large part on quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home averaged only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is an alarmingly low total. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this nursing home also didn't fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility.