Corydon Specialty Care

Corydon Specialty Care is a small non-profit nursing home located in Corydon, Iowa. This nursing home received an overall grade of D, which is a relatively poor score. As far as we can see, we would be very reluctant to recommend this nursing home. More information on this facility's category grades may be found below. Its best category was inspections, which is discussed in the next section.

Although we did not rate this nursing home well overall, we wanted to note its decent health inspections in recent years. We gave it a relatively respectable grade of B- in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively minor. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. This proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility an B-. Our nursing score is based on a number of datapoints. The most heavily weighted one is the number of hours nurses spend with residents. This facility provides 2.8 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics. While this facility got dinged a bit for nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of these quality metrics. With fewer than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it fared remarkably well in this metric. This is often an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of turning a resident even once per day.

The third most favorable area we gave this facility in any category came in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of B-. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary objective 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 residents. After we finished looking at the quantity of nursing care, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. We were optimistic to find that this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Finally, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.9 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility's least impressive area is short-term care, which is the final area we assessed. For this area, we gave this nursing home a D. Our short-term care scores are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a wide spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. Given its abysmal rating in this area, we were not surprised to discover that this facility provides substantially fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most facilities. Finally, we assessed the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 35.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.