Country Aire Retirement Center

We wanted to point out that this facility's long-term care score outpaced its overall grade. In fact, we awarded it a B+ for its long-term care grade, which is one of our better grades. This propped up its overall grade. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 97.79412 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a dangerous health condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility actually received a solid government inspection report this year as well, with few major dings from the applicable government inspectors. As a result, it received one of our better grades in that category with a B-. We believe that one of the most important factors in assessing an inspection report is deficiencies. In this regard, we especially focus on the severity of the deficiencies. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

Another strength of this facility is its favorable grade in nursing. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with an impressive grade of D. The nursing category analyzes many datapoints, most of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home averaged only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is not a very impressive figure. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. This place fared well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these metrics to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we graded is short-term care, which turned out to be this facility's worst category. We gave this facility a grade of D in that area. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to have good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to have higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Considering its abysmal rating in this category, we were not shocked to find this place offered far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The final metric we assessed in this area is the number of patients who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 5 percent of its patients returning home. This was quite a bit below average.