Tallgrass Creek

We also found that this nursing home excelled at short-term care. We awarded them an A+ in this area. Our short-term care scores are based in part on the facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a wide spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, in addition to other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.3 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

This nursing home also received a nearly flawless inspection report. As a result, it received one of our highest scores in that area with an A+. This is one of the few facilities to receive multiple A+'s. Inspection ratings are tied to pieces of information found on the a nursing home's government inspections. Nursing homes that score well in this area typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

Another reason we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. The nursing rating analyzes several components, many of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In the final category we scored, this nursing home received an impressive grade grade of A- in our long-term care category. With this score, the facility topped off a straight A profile. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 94.26752 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia tragically can be a dangerous ailment for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility doesn't take any chances. 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 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.