Dixon Healthcare Center

This nursing home earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless government inspection reports in recent years. We awarded them an A- in this category. Our inspection ratings are based on several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple of minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

We also gave this nursing home a decent score in the category of nursing care, with a grade of C. Our nursing grade is mostly associated with a nursing home's nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, nursing scores also consider quality-based measures, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this facility actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is often an indicator that a facility has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses to assist its patients.

The next category we graded was short-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a solid grade of C. Our short-term care scores are considered to be more critical for those in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. We were surprised to find that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. The facility provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The final metric we looked at in this area is the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The last category we scored was long-term care, which turned out to be a low point for this nursing home. We awarded this facility a grade of D for our long-term care category. If you are looking for services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care ratings. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Fortunately, this nursing home provided the vaccine to 99.492386 percent of its patients, which is a very solid statistic. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.