Cypress Care Center

The main reason this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an elite nursing grade. In fact, we gave this facility a grade of A-. Our nursing grade assesses the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We factor in both the levels of training of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This nursing home's inspection rating exceeded its overall grade as well. We gave them one of our better scores in that category, with a B. This is a notably better score than its overall score. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be relatively minor. This nursing home was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

The next area we graded was long-term care, where this facility was given a B- in this category. With our long-term care grade, we focus more on the sheer quantity of services provided by a nursing home, along with some qualitative measures. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 91.2892 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which happens to be somewhat below what we were hoping for but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Nevertheless, this nursing home excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The next category we scored was short-term care. We awarded it a C in that area. This is a perfectly acceptable grade in this area. In forming our short-term care grades, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our purpose is to devise a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 3.8 percent of this facility's patients returned home.