The Caring Place

Although we graded this place incredibly poorly overall, it received a relatively impressive inspection report this year. As a result, it earned one of our better grades in that category with a B. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. It is typically in your best interest to avoid nursing homes that had a long list of deficiencies. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

Turning to the area of long-term care, this nursing home was awarded a grade of just D in that area. Sadly, this wound up being one of its better grades. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means the nursing home did not perform well in our measures relating to patient care. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination statistics. We were a bit alarmed this nursing home vaccinated 72.56944 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is quite a bit below the national average. Surprisingly, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This was its best feature in this category.

Turning to the area of nursing care, this facility received a grade of just D in this category. Our nursing grade is based on many datapoints, most of which are tied to nursing hours. This place offered a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing ratings. This nursing home performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The last area we assessed is short-term care, where this facility was given a very poor score here also. We gave it an F for this area, which is definitely a major concern. Short-term care grades are often used to grade a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To provide good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The last item we considered in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.3 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics sunk this nursing home's short-term care score.