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 5.6 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. Our nursing rating is mostly associated with the nursing home's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed 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.

Turning to another of this nursing home's strengths, it also earned a very impressive inspection rating. In fact, inspections proved to be one of its best category grades. In that category, we awarded this facility an impressive grade of B+. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that 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. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

The next area we rated was nursing, is this nursing home's worst category. We gave this facility a D in that area. This really was one of the couple of weak links on a very solid profile. 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 patients. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is better than the average nursing home. Surprisingly, this nursing home also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.