Timber Ridge Health Center

Although we didn't rate this facility favorably overall, we actually gave it an excellent grade in the category of inspections, where it received a grade of A-. Arguably the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. It is generally best to avoid nursing homes that had a long list of deficiencies. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as 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 minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

We gave this nursing home just a D for our long-term care rating and that actually ended up being its second most favorable category. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. After we finished assessing the amount of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. We were optimistic to discover that this facility vaccinated 98.820755 percent of its residents for pneumonia. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 1.12 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

This facility's next best category was nursing, but even there it received a grade of just D. This is still a well below average grade. Nursing grades are tied to quality and quantity of nursing care. This particular nursing home provided 3.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day, which is below average. This facility also had abysmal marks in some of the quality-based metrics to pair with its low nursing hours. We looked at the percent of residents suffering pressure ulcers and we were disappointed. This nursing home was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that so many pressure ulcers are preventable with better nursing care. This statistic helped pull down this facility's nursing grade quite a bit.

Turning to the last area, this nursing home really didn't fare well here either. Due to a rock bottom grade of F in short-term care, this is just about as bad as it gets. In computing our short-term care grades, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The goal is to formulate a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. We found that this place was subpar in several staffing areas we looked at. In fact, it offered fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 39.7 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. At most facilities, about half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.