Canterbury Towers

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this facility an A+ for our inspection category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some are quite insignificant. 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.

Another reason we assessed this facility so favorably is that it was awarded an A+ long-term care score. This is simply as dominant as it gets in this area. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. After we finished looking at the volume of nursing care, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia can be a deadly illness for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this nursing home 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.

Another reason we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. There are numerous factors included in this area. Most of the criteria relate to the quantity of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

In the final category, this facility also received an impressive short-term care score, with a grade of A. This wrapped up a very impressive profile. Our short-term care grade is generally used to score a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last datapoint we considered in this category is the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from the facility. We found that 5.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.