Carson Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

In addition to earning a great overall grade, this facility really excelled in the category of nursing, where it received an A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. The nursing grade includes several datapoints. The most heavily weighted factor is the quantity of hours nurses spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place Nevada in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of turning a patient at least once a day.

In addition, we also wanted to point out that this nursing home received favorable short-term care marks this year. We gave them one of our higher scores in this category, with a grade of B. This proved to be the facility's second strongest score. With our short-term care category, we attempt to craft a sound barometer for rehabilitation. In this process, we look at a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final statistic we assessed in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We found that 5 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Turning to our inspection category, it appears this nursing home has earned respectable inspections in recent years as well. We gave it a B- in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively minor. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

This nursing home's least impressive category was long-term care, which is the last area we looked at. In this area, we gave this facility a grade of D. Nursing homes that do not score well in long-term care often don't provide as much nursing care and also may be struggling in some of the areas of routine personal care we looked at. After assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. We were a bit alarmed this nursing home vaccinated 80.314964 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which happens to be quite a bit below what we were hoping for. To our surprise, this facility was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.