Canon Lodge Care Center

In addition to earning a great overall grade, this nursing home fared even better in our inspections category which is based on the facility's recent inspection reports. We gave it an A for this category, which is one of our best scores. Inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also gave this nursing home a score of A- for our long-term care grade. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 99.06542 percent of its patients, which is much higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facilities third most favorable area was short-term care. We gave it a grade of B- in this area. This is essentially a slightly below average score in this area. Our short-term care grades are considered to be more important for people in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally requires additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of patients who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.1 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Turning to our next category, this facility received a respectable nursing grade of C. We weighed the skill-level of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the quantity of time the nurses were with residents, in calculating our rating in this category. This place averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily, which is well below average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures. While this facility got dinged a bit for nursing hours, it actually excelled in some of these quality-based measures. With less than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this metric. This is typically a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving residents at least once a day.