Copper Ridge Care Center

To pair with its strong overall performance, we awarded this facility a grade of A for our inspections rating. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government 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.

This nursing home was awarded impressive grades in the category of short-term care as well. In fact, it received one of our most superb grades in that category with a score of A-. In the category of short-term care, we strive to assess indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. It doesn't look like this nursing home submitted data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The last item we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients that were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Turning to another strength for this nursing home, we gave them one of our stronger grades in our long-term care category as well, with a grade of B+. When facilities receive this type of grade in this category it is usually a good sign for resident care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. After considering the quantity of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is too frequently a deadly ailment for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The last category we graded is nursing, ended up being this facility's least impressive category. We awarded this facility a D in that category. This is one of the couple of dings of a very solid report card. Our nursing rating analyzes the facility's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of skill of those nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. With only 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, this place's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below average. While this facility didn't excel in nursing hours, it actually surprised us in some of the quality-based assessments in the nursing category, such as avoiding serious falls. This place was above average in this datapoint, which is one redeeming quality we found in this category.