Candlewood Healthcare and Rehabilitation

We weren't high on this nursing home's overall scores or its category grades. We gave it a grade of just just D for our nursing rating and that proved to be its best score. Nursing ratings are based in large part on quantity of nursing care available. 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 measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home fared well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these statistics to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.

Turning to the category of long-term care, this facility received just a D in that category. Unfortunately, this ended up being one of its better features. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means the nursing home didn't perform well in our measures relating to patient care. After assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. Unfortunately, this facility vaccinated just 74.93473 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Surprisingly, this facility actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.

We also wanted to point out this facility's inspection grade where it received a lowly F. We would advise paying special attention to any deficiencies on a facility's inspection reports when it receives this poor of an inspection score. We recommend you pay close attention to the severity of those deficiencies. This particular nursing home was hit with 2 deficiencies by CMS. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they posed a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility also received 18 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is yet another bad sign.

The final area we analyzed was short-term care, where this nursing home received a bottom of the barrel score in this category as well. We gave it a lowly F for this area, which is obviously a major concern. Our short-term care ratings are believed to be most critical for those in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates more skilled nursing services. This means not merely nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. With its grade in this category, we were not stunned to find that this nursing home is well below average in terms of its number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its patients based on the measures we looked at. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.