The Waters of Indianapolis

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this facility really excelled in the category of inspections, where it received an A+. Few facilities performed better in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are quite insignificant. While this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This means that CMS did not consider 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 always a good sign.

In addition, we gave this facility a grade of B in our long-term care category. This is one of our higher scores. For long-term care residents, the facility'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. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 38.88889 percent of its patients. This is slightly lower than we anticipated but still a decent percentage. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility wound up receiving a a very poor score in our short-term care category. It received a lowly F in this category. In calculating our short-term care grades, we look at the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This category is frequently a fair measure of the facility's rehabilitation services. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who returned home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well off the national average.

This facility's least impressive category is nursing, which is the last area we looked at. Sadly, it received a lowly F for this area. In spite of several acceptable scores in other areas, this score is nevertheless of a concern so we wanted to make a note of it. In computing our nursing scores, we weigh both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels 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. Lastly, we also looked at a few quality measures in computing our nursing ratings. This place was above average in two of the major metrics we focus on, with solid scores for minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.