Crandall Medical Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. These inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

Another one of this nursing home's above average category scores came in the area of long-term care. We gave them one of our stronger scores in that category, with a score of B+. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. This facility didn't perform quite as well in this category as it did in some other categories. Nevertheless, this is still a respectable score. When determining a nursing home's nursing rating, we consider the amount of time nurses commit to patients as well as the level of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, our nursing ratings also factor in quality-based metrics, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this facility performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is often a reliable indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls can be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

The last area we looked at was short-term care, ended up being this nursing home's worst area. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in that area. This was one of just a few dings in a strong profile. Our short-term care grades are based on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a wide spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. In this nursing home's case, it looks like it offers fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the typical facility. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who returned home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.6 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.