Courtyard Health Care Center

In addition to being a quality nursing home overall, this facility excelled in the area of short-term care, where it received an impressive grade of A-. Few facilities fared better in this category. In determining our short-term care grades, we assess the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This grade is often a solid measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who ultimately returned home from this nursing home. We found that 5.5 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

Adding to its strong performance in other areas, we gave this nursing home an B+ for our nursing rating. Our nursing grade is mostly associated with the nursing home's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

In addition, this nursing home also excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned an impressive grade of B+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This tells you CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

The last area we graded is long-term care, ended up being this nursing home's weakest area. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in this category. This really is one of just a few weak links in a very solid report card. In a long-term care environment, the 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. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents, which is a very solid datapoint. To our surprise, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.