Twin Lakes

On top of being a first rate facility overall, this facility also performed well in our inspections category, where it earned an A+. Very few places performed as well in this area. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Sadly, this facility received a category L deficiency, which is not what we expected given its inspection grade. These are the worst type of deficiencies. This category of deficiency means the government inspectors identified a widespread deficiency placing resident health or safety in imminent jeopardy. Even a single serious deficiency of this nature should be taken seriously. In spite of this major red flag, other aspects of this facility's inspection report gave us some hope.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its long-term care grade. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in long-term care it is usually a good sign for resident care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. Once we finished looking at the quantity of nursing care, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a dangerous health condition for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home also received an A+ for its nursing grade. When determining a facility's nursing rating, we assess the number of hours nurses are seeing patients as well as the level of skill of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The final area we rated was short-term care, where this nursing home received an A. This wrapped up a very favorable report card. Only a select few facilities received an A- or better in all four categories. In forming our short-term care ratings, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our goal is to formulate a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents that eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.