View Ridge Care Center

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. We looked at the levels of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time the nurses were with residents, in calculating our grade in this area. This nursing home averages 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a system of turning patients more often.

This nursing home also received a dominant short-term care grade. In fact, this is its second best category grade. In that category, this facility received a grade of A. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to score a facility's rehabilitation services. To provide quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.2 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility earned a grade of B for its inspections rating. This is a well above average score in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite minor. Unfortunately, this nursing home was hit with a category L deficiency, which is not what we expected given its inspection rating. This category means inspectors identified a widespread deficiency placing patient health or safety in imminent danger. In spite of this major red flag, other aspects of this facility's inspection report gave us some hope.

The last category we assessed is long-term care, in which this facility was awarded a B-. Although this is its least impressive category rating, this is nevertheless not a poor grade. Our long-term care grade is commonly used to assess a facility's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing on the skilled nursing services provided by a skilled nursing facility. Once we finished looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. We were optimistic to find that this nursing home vaccinates 99.187 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Finally, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.