Timber Springs Transitional Care: Food Safety Failures - ID
It wasn't alone. Inspectors that afternoon also found baking soda expired in June 2025, tomatillos dated September 1 with no use-by date and visible mold, and yams with no date at all, also moldy. All of it was in the Assisted Living Kitchen that prepares food for the facility's 98 residents.
When the dietary manager was told about the expired and moldy items, he said the main kitchen is run by a different facility and that they should have identified the expired food and thrown it away. He offered no explanation for why they hadn't.
The kitchen problems didn't stop with storage. Inspectors also found a cooking skillet with black residue encrusted on the interior and a second skillet with a scratched Teflon coating. The dietary manager looked at both and acknowledged the first was visibly dirty and the second should have been discarded. He said he was not sure why the manager of the Assisted Living Kitchen had not cleaned or thrown them away.
Scratched Teflon and encrusted black residue on cooking surfaces aren't minor housekeeping issues. Encrusted equipment can impede the heat transfer needed to cook food adequately and can attract insects when not in use.
Three days before inspectors found the expired food, on September 8, they had already documented another problem on the facility's second floor: an ice machine with black residue running down the right interior side. The dietary manager said the machine had last been cleaned on August 25 and was cleaned monthly. He said he was not sure why there was black residue inside it. Residents had been receiving ice from that machine in the weeks since the last cleaning.
The hand hygiene failures inspectors observed during the lunch tray line on September 11 added a fourth category of concern. Between 11:38 AM and 12:20 PM, a dietary aide served resident food using ladles with his bare hands, then put on gloves to cut up food directly for residents with dietary restrictions, then removed the gloves and went back to serving with ladles. He did not wash his hands at any point between those tasks.
When inspectors raised the issue at 12:25 PM, the dietary manager said that since the aide had not left his workstation and had been serving food consistently for less than four hours, handwashing between glove use and task changes was not required.
That explanation runs counter to how glove use and hand hygiene are supposed to work. Gloves are not a substitute for handwashing. Removing gloves and then handling food with bare hands, or donning gloves without first washing, transfers whatever contamination was present before the gloves went on. The aide's continuous presence at one workstation doesn't change that.
Taken together, the inspection findings describe a kitchen operation where basic food safety practices had broken down across multiple areas at once: storage, equipment cleaning, cooking surfaces, and personal hygiene. The dietary manager's responses throughout the inspection were consistent — he acknowledged each problem and then attributed it to someone else's failure to act, whether a separate facility's kitchen staff or an Assisted Living Kitchen manager. He did not describe any corrective action he had taken or planned to take during the inspection itself.
Ninety-eight residents ate food stored and prepared under these conditions.
Full Inspection Report
The details above represent a summary of key findings. View the complete inspection report for Timber Springs Transitional Care from 2025-09-12 including all violations, facility responses, and corrective action plans.
Download the official CMS inspection PDF from Medicare.gov
Additional Resources
Data source: This article is based on inspection data downloaded directly from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) via Medicare.gov. CMS releases inspection reports in bulk; we publish the findings as documented by state surveyors in the official Form CMS-2567 Statement of Deficiencies.
Plan of correction: The CMS report we receive does not include the facility's plan of correction. Facilities submit plans of correction separately to state survey agencies and those responses may not be reflected in CMS data at the time of publication. The absence of a plan of correction in our data does not mean one was not filed. Readers who want information about corrective steps taken are encouraged to contact the facility directly or their state survey agency.
Corrections may have occurred: Inspection reports reflect conditions observed on the date of the survey. Facilities may have implemented corrections, staffing changes, additional training, or other remediation since the report was issued. We report what CMS provides and encourage readers to seek current information from the facility.
Editorial process: Inspection findings are extracted from CMS source documents and synthesized using AI, reviewed for factual accuracy against the original report by our editorial team.
Professional review: All content reviewed by Christopher F. Nesbitt, Sr., NH EMT & BU-trained Paralegal.
Last verified: September 22, 2026 · Our methodology
Timber Springs Transitional Care in Boise, ID was cited for violations during a health inspection on September 12, 2025.
All of it was in the Assisted Living Kitchen that prepares food for the facility's 98 residents.
Health inspections identify deficiencies that facilities must correct. Violations range from minor documentation issues to serious safety concerns. Review the full report below for specific details and facility response.