Twin Lakes

Twin Lakes is located in the large metropolitan area of Cincinnati, Ohio which has a population of 795,220 people. This turns out to be a grade A facility, which is a very elite grade. Not surprisingly, this turned out to be quite a bit better than many of the nursing homes in Cincinnati. Headlining this place's exemplary profile is its nursing rating, which we will address in the next paragraph.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. The nursing rating includes several datapoints, but the main consideration is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provided 5.1 hours of nursing care per patient daily, which is among the better totals in the country. A significant portion of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the more skilled levels of nurses. We were very impressed by both of these statistics. On top of providing impressive levels of nursing care, this facility also excelled in the quality measures we looked at. By way of illustration, it performed as well as any facility in the state in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We look at these metrics as predictive measures of the caliber of nursing care provided.

This facility also earned an A+ inspection grade, making it one of the few nursing homes to receive multiple A+'s in our category grades. Our inspection ratings account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with better scores in this category tend to have very few of these severe deficiencies. Unfortunately, this nursing home received a category L deficiency, which was unexpected based on its inspection score. This category of deficiency indicates inspectors uncovered a widespread deficiency putting resident safety or health in immediate danger. In spite of this major red flag, other aspects of this facility's inspection report gave us some hope.

In the third category we looked at, this nursing home received strong marks in the area of short-term care. Consequently, it was given one of our most impressive grades in that category with a of A+. Our short-term care grades are presumably most critical for people needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires more skilled nursing services. This includes not only nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. One of this facility's strengths is registered nurse hours. This facility offers more care from registered nurses than most facilities. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of facilities in this area with 61.8 percent of its patients returning home.

The last category we scored ended up being this nursing home's worst category. Nevertheless, even in its worst category we still gave it an acceptable grade of B- for long-term care. In a long-term care setting, the primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. In addition to offering very solid levels of nursing care and other staffing, this nursing home gave the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.