Cedar Ridge Center

Even though we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a B- for our short-term care rating. With our short-term care score, we strive to craft a fair measure for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess the facility's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. We found that this place was below average in the two key staffing areas we focus on. In fact, it offered fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. It is important to determine whether this is adversely impacting the quality of care. The last measure we considered in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is actually below average.

This nursing home did not receive favorable government inspection reports in recent years. In fact, it received a grade of just D for its inspection grade, which was unfortunately its second best category. Inspection ratings weigh many items found on the nursing home's recent inspection reports. When you see severe deficiencies on the reports, this is typically a bad sign. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to resident safety. This nursing home had 6 deficiencies by CMS. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they caused a risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility also received 13 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is yet another bad sign.

This facility ended up receiving a bottom of the barrel score in our long-term care category. It received an F in this area. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 98.10875 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is more than the average nursing home. Surprisingly, this facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

The next area we analyzed is nursing. Sadly, it received a lowly F in this area, which is a poor score. The nursing score includes a number of subcategories. The most important one is the amount of time nurses spent with patients. 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. In addition to performing poorly in terms of nursing hours, this facility also had rock bottom scores in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing grades. For starters, we looked at the percent of residents experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home was at more than double the national average in both of these data points. This is alarming when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This sealed this facility's fate of receiving a poor nursing score.