Warm Springs Medical Center Nursing Home

We want to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home really outperformed its overall grade in the category of inspections. In fact, it received an excellent government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest scores in that area with an A+. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received high marks in the category of long-term care, with a superb grade of A- in this area. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. After considering the quantity of nursing care, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 94.94585 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a life threatening health condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility's second lowest score is short-term care, where it earned just a D in that area. This is a well below average score. Short-term care grades are commonly used to gauge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation In order to offer quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to have higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Unfortunately, we found that this place provides fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most nursing homes. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Turning to the last area, we gave this nursing home a grade of D for our nursing category. This was the facility's worst category score. Sadly, this category pulled down the facility's overall grade to a certain degree. We assessed the levels of nurses at the facility, in addition to the quantity of hours the nurses were with patients, in computing our rating in this area. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. In addition to receiving below average scores for nursing hours, this place was less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and found that this facility was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in this statistic. This is a bad sign when you consider that so many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic dragged down this nursing home's nursing score substantially.