The Oaks - Limestone

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility has received near flawless inspections recently. We gave them an A+ in this category. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

To complement its top-shelf assessments in other areas, we gave this nursing home a grade of A for its short-term care grade. Our short-term care ratings are meaningful for residents looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a vast spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 6.7 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Turning to an additional strength for this facility, we gave them one of our stronger grades in our long-term care category as well, with a grade of B+. For prospective residents in need of a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 93.13725 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is a bit less than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The final area we graded is nursing, in which this nursing home was given a grade of B-. This actually turned out to be this nursing home's weakest category. This is nevertheless not a bad grade. Nursing scores are based largely on quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, our nursing scores also factor in quality-based measures, such as avoiding major falls. Although this facility did not have as many nursing hours per resident as many other nursing homes we looked at, it was still better than average in the area of avoiding falls. This is usually a reliable indicator of how carefully a facility's nursing staff is tending to its patients. Major falls can frequently be avoided if more nurses and safety protocols are in place.