Aristacare at Cedar Oaks

In addition to being a great nursing home overall, it also earned A+ government inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Our inspection ratings are tied to several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among the reasons we graded this nursing home so well is that it received a favorable long-term care grade. Indeed, long-term care turned out to be its second best category score. In that category, we gave this facility a score of A-. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 69.30556 percent of its residents. This is slightly below what we were hoping for. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Turning to the category of nursing care, this facility didn't perform quite as well in this area as some of the categories discussed above. Nevertheless, a grade of B- in this category is by no means a bad score. Our nursing rating is largely associated with a nursing home's nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home actually fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In fact, it performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the number of hours of care offered.

The final area we looked at was short-term care, where this facility received a B-. This is this nursing home's least impressive area. This is still not a major area of concern. Short-term care grades are typically used to grade a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. It doesn't appear that this facility submitted registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The final metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients that returned home from the facility. We found that just 5.4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.