The Waters of Clifty Falls

While this place's overall score was terrible, it actually performed well in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B+ for that area, which is one of our better scores. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. It is generally in your best interest to avoid nursing homes that had too many severe deficiencies. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

This nursing home ended up receiving a rock-bottom grade in our short-term care category. It was given an F in this category. In determining our short-term care ratings, we analyze a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This category is typically a meaningful measure of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Given its grade in this area, we weren't surprised to discover that this place is well below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the metrics we looked at. Honestly, this was what we expected here. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.5 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.

Tragically, we gave this facility an F for its long-term care grade. For residents looking for a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 97.93815 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

The final category we analyzed is nursing. Sadly, it received a lowly F for this area, which is a bottom of the barrel score. In computing a facility's nursing grade, we consider the quantity of hours nurses are seeing patients and the level of licensure of those nurses. 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. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this place also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these scores hurt this nursing home's nursing rating quite a bit.