Tamarack Ridge Health and Rehabilitation

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively minor. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

To add to its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for its long-term care score. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. This facility performed well enough in these metrics to earn an encouraging score in this area.

This facility is also strong in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B+. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. Our nursing grade is largely based on the facility's 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 place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The fourth category we looked at is short-term care, where this facility received a B+. This wrapped up an elite report card. Very few facilities received a B+ or higher in all four categories. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to assess a facility's rehabilitation services. To provide good rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.