Winning Wheels

While this place's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B- for that category, which is one of our better scores. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are relatively minor. This place was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to create an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

As it turns out, this nursing home only earned a grade of D for its short-term care rating, which was actually one of its higher category grades. Our short-term care grades are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a broad scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other forms of therapy. With a score this poor for this category, we weren't stunned to discover that this facility was below average in the two key staffing metrics we assess. It provided far fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other facilities. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.

Sadly, this facility's third best score is long-term care. Nevertheless, with a grade of D in this area, it still fared relatively badly. Nursing homes that receive this type of grade in long-term care likely don't provide the kind of consistent around the clock care that some other facilities provide. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We found that this nursing home provided the vaccine to only 81.90476 percent of its patients, which is several points lower than we expected. Surprisingly, this nursing home actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.

Turning to our fourth area, this nursing home did not fare very well in this area either. Due to a bottom of the barrel grade of F in nursing, this is really as bad as it gets. Our nursing score analyzes the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of training of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.