Twin Lakes Community

On top of receiving an elite overall rating, this facility also received an A+ inspection grade. This score is based on its recent government inspections. An A+ in this area is one of the highest complements we can pay to a facility. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. A few minor dings are not necessarily something to panic about.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. Nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A-. In determining a nursing home's nursing grade, we consider the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents and the level of licensure of the 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 place 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 avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In addition, this facility also was given favorable short-term care grades in our assessment. Indeed, we gave it one of our more favorable grades in that area, with a score of B+. In computing our short-term care scores, we assess a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This category is frequently a solid measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.1 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Moving on to our final category, this nursing home received a high-end long-term care grade. Although this is not nearly as dominant as some of its other grades, this is nevertheless one of the more favorable scores a facility can receive. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary objective 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. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 85.12111 percent of its patients. This is a bit less than we expected. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.