Canterbury Villa of Alliance

While we didn't give this nursing home a good overall grade, we actually gave it a strong grade in the category of inspections, where it earned a B. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. It is typically in your best interest to avoid facilities that have too many severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

One of this nursing home's higher category scores came in the category of short-term care. This wound up being its second most favorable category. In that category, we gave this facility a B-. In determining our short-term care ratings, we size up a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This area is frequently a fair assessment of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. In this nursing home's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the average facility. The last measure we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.

As it turns out, this nursing home only received a D for its long-term care score, which is not one of our better scores. Facilities that receive this type of score in this category may not provide the type of consistent around the clock care that some other facilities provide. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 93.13305 percent of its residents. This is somewhat lower than we anticipated but still a respectable figure. Surprisingly, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This is its best score in this category.

The next area we assessed was nursing, which is this nursing home's least impressive area. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in that area. When computing a facility's nursing grade, we look at the amount of time nurses are with residents as well as the levels of training of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing ratings. This facility performed well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.