Cedar Hills Geriatric Center

Although we were not complementary of this facility's overall performance, it actually received an impressive inspection report this year with few dings from the applicable government inspectors. As a result, it received one of our better grades in that area with a B. Our inspection grades weigh a host of factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. You should avoid facilities with too many severe deficiencies flagged. This nursing home was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered severe. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to resident health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

This nursing home's long-term care grade turns out to be one of its respectable grades. The facility was given a grade of B- in this category. Long-term care grades are crucial for individuals in need of non-healthcare services such as personal care. After assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. We were optimistic to find that this facility vaccinated 96.38989 percent of its patients for pneumonia. This facility also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In our next category, we gave this nursing home a rock-bottom F in the area of short-term care. In computing our short-term care grades, we assess a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This rating is frequently a reliable measure of a facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Based on its score in this category, we were not surprised to find that this place is well below average in terms of its number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the measures we looked at. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This wasn't a strength for this nursing home. 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.

The last area we analyzed is nursing. We gave it an abysmal F for this area, which is a bottom of the barrel score. In determining a nursing home's nursing rating, we assess the quantity of hours nurses are seeing patients as well as the level of licensure of those nurses. This place provided a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is well below average. To pair with its below average total nursing hours per resident, this place had bad scores in several of the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. For starters, we looked at the percent of patients having falls leading to serious injury. This place was at more than 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is quite alarming in light of the fact that so many falls could be avoided with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the nursing home's fate of receiving a poor nursing grade.