Dogwood Trails Manor

This nursing home received a strong overall score as described above, but we especially would like to emphasize its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We gave it an A+ in this category. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to this nursing home's list of strengths, it also was given a first-rate long-term care score. We gave them an impressive strong of A- in this category. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. After looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is significantly higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next best category we gave this nursing home in any category came in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of C. Short-term care grades are crucial for prospective residents looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a broad spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, it does not look like this nursing home submitted information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. The last item we assessed in this area is the number of residents that eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The last area we rated is nursing, was this nursing home's weakest area. We gave this facility a D in this area. This really is one of the couple of weak points on an otherwise impressive report card. When computing a nursing home's nursing grade, we assess the number of hours nurses commit to patients and the level of skill of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Although this nursing home's nursing hours are below average, it actually surprised us in a few of the qualitative metrics in this category. In particular, we were pleased to see that its residents are suffering fewer pressure ulcers than most nursing homes.