The Lodge at Bear Creek

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this place really excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively insignificant. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

This nursing home also received a strong long-term care grade. As a matter of fact, we gave them a grade of B in that area, which is one of our better. In a long-term care environment, the primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours was vaccines. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccination to 83.333336 percent of its residents. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B-. In computing our nursing grades, we analyze both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Finally, nursing scores also consider quality-based measures, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this facility actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally an indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls can be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

Switching gears to our last category, this nursing home received a grade of C for short-term care, which is an acceptable score. In determining our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is frequently a meaningful measure of the facility's rehabilitation services. Unfortunately, it does not look like this facility submitted registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The final measure we assessed in this area is the number of residents who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.3 percent of this facility's residents returned home. This figure was below the national average.