Concordia at the Cedars

On top of performing well overall, this nursing home earned an excellent short-term care grade. In fact, we gave it an A in that category. Short-term care grades are typically employed to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To have highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.1 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

Adding to its strong assessment, this facility also was awarded a dominant long-term care score, with a grade of A-. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia can be a dangerous illness for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Moving on to another of this facility's strengths, it also received a very impressive inspection rating. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B+. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively minor. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The next area we looked at was nursing, where this facility was awarded a B. Although this is its weakest category score, this is still a strong score. When calculating our nursing grades, we assess both nursing hours and the training levels of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.