Tallwoods Care Center

While we were not high on this nursing home overall, we awarded it an A for our inspections rating. This score is far more impressive than the facility's overall grade. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are quite insignificant. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are 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 health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

Turning to the category of long-term care, this facility was given just a D in that category. As it turns out, this ended up being one of its better grades. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in this category it is often a bad sign for resident care and it may mean that the place is not as well-staffed. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 91.70125 percent of its patients, which is a few points less than we were hoping for. To our surprise, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.

Unfortunately, this facility only received a grade of D for its nursing grade, which was actually one of its better category grades. In calculating a nursing home's nursing score, we look at the amount of time nurses are seeing residents as well as the level of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home averaged just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing ratings. This place fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

The final area we assessed is short-term care, in which this facility received a very poor score in this category also. Sadly, it received a lowly F in this area, which is obviously somewhat alarming. With our short-term care assessment, we try to create a meaningful measure for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess the facility's levels of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. With its poor score in this category, we weren't shocked to discover that this facility offers far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most facilities. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.2 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics doomed this facility's short-term care grade.