Anchor Lodge Nursing Home

While this nursing home's overall score was not a highlight, it actually excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A for that area, which is one of our highest scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are quite minor. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

One of this nursing home's better category grades came in the area of long-term care. This wound up being its second most favorable category. In that area, we awarded this facility a C. For residents looking for a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. We were pleased to find that this nursing home vaccinated 97.46835 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Finally, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Unfortunately, this facility only received a grade of D for its nursing grade, which was actually one of its better category grades. The nursing rating assesses several factors, however, the paramount one is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing grades. This place performed well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these statistics to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.

The last area we rated is short-term care. Sadly, it received an abysmal F in this area, which is an abysmal score. In crafting these short-term care grades, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to devise a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Given its poor rating in this area, we were not surprised to discover that this facility offered substantially fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most nursing homes. The final measure we considered in this area is the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 5.1 percent of its patients returning home. This was well below the national average.