Courtyards Comm Living Center

The primary reason this nursing home received a decent overall grade is its impeccable inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our higher scores in that area, with a grade of A+. This is a much better grade than the place's overall grade, which was decent but not in the elite range. Our inspection ratings account for a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area typically have very few of these severe 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. Based on this, we still had a generally positive view of this facility's recent inspections.

The next most favorable area we gave this nursing home in any area came in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a grade of B-. In determining these short-term care ratings, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to devise a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Unfortunately, we found that this facility provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The key is determining what bearing this had on quality of care. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 4.5 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

We gave this nursing home just a D for our long-term care grade. This is well below average in this category. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Thankfully, this nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is a very solid datapoint. To our surprise, this place also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

The next area we scored is nursing, which proved to be this facility's worst category. We awarded this facility a grade of D in that category. We assessed the levels of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours those nurses spent with patients, in determining our grade in this category. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. On top of rating below average in nursing hours per resident, this place also had poor marks in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This place was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in both of these statistics. This is a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These scores pulled down this facility's nursing rating significantly.