The Methodist Oaks

While this nursing home earned a decent overall grade, its inspections score is notably more impressive than its overall grade. Due to a strong health inspection report this year, it earned a strong score in that category with a grade of B. These inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means the 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 of minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

Another one of this facility's higher category grades was in the category of long-term care. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 45.741325 percent of its patients for pneumonia. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, we were pleased to find facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home received its next highest category score in the area of short-term care. We gave this facility a grade of B- in this area, which is a respectable score. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we assess the facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This score is frequently a solid assessment of the facility's rehabilitation. In this place's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than a typical facility. The final item we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 5.4 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.

The last area we rated was nursing, ended up being this facility's worst category. We awarded this facility a D in this area. Nursing ratings are mostly associated with a facility's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home averaged just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This number is far below average. Unfortunately, this nursing home also had abysmal marks in some of the quality-based metrics to pair with its weak nursing hour totals. We looked at the percent of patients suffering pressure ulcers and we were disappointed. This facility was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this measure. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. This statistic helped pull down this nursing home's nursing rating significantly.