Dixon Nursing & Rehab

While this facility's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Our inspection grades are tied to datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this area typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

We also awarded this nursing home a middle of the pack grade in the area of long-term care, where we awarded it a grade of B-. Long-term care scores are critical for patients seeking non-healthcare services such as personal care. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 99.337746 percent of its patients. This nursing home also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility was awarded its third best category grade in the category of short-term care. We awarded this facility a C in this area, which is a respectable score. Short-term care ratings are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a broad scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than a typical facility. The final item we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.

The last category we looked at was nursing, which was a weak spot for this nursing home. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D for the area of nursing. There are several data points included in this grade. Most of the data points relate to nurse staffing. This place offered a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is well below average. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This nursing home had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these statistics hurt this nursing home's nursing rating significantly.