Copper Ridge Health and Rehabilitation Center

With an address in Butte, Montana, Copper Ridge Health and Rehabilitation Center is one of only three nursing homes in this city. This is a solid facility, with an overall grade of B-. You can certainly do worse than this facility. The best part of this facility's profile is its remarkable inspection score. Inspection reports are discussed in the next section.

The main reason this ended up being a decent nursing home is that it received an excellent inspection grade. In fact, its inspection score was far superior to its overall grade. In the inspections category, we gave this facility an A. Inspection ratings weigh a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better scores in this area usually have very few of these severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

Turning to an additional strength for this facility, we gave it an elite short-term care grade. Indeed, we awarded this facility a score of A. Short-term care grades are crucial for people in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a vast range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides more care with registered nurses to its residents than the average nursing home. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who returned home from this facility. This place outperformed the overwhelming majority of facilities in the nation with 63.5 percent of its patients returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most nursing homes.

In addition, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B in our nursing category. This is one of our better grades. The nursing grade weighs a host of factors. The most heavily weighted factor is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This nursing home provides 3.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these statistics as good measures of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The last area we looked at is long-term care. It received an F in this area, which is a bottom of the barrel grade. This is certainly a major disappointment. For prospective patients looking for a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 94.897964 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is better than most nursing homes. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 1.44 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.