Manor Court of Carbondale

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this facility performed at an even higher level in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A-. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this category typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

Contributing to its profile, this facility also earned a score of B+ for its short-term care rating. This is an above average score in this category. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we look at a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This grade is typically a useful assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. When we looked at this facility's physical therapist hours, we found it offered more hours of physical therapy per day to its residents than most nursing homes. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who returned home from this nursing home. In addition to excelling in the area of physical therapy, we found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in the nation with 61.9 percent of its patients returning home.

Turning to our next area, this facility also received a score of B for its long-term care rating. This is an above average grade in this area. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. This nursing home's vaccination records weren't as favorable as its number of nursing hours per resident. This facility gave the pneumonia vaccine to just 53.505535 percent of its patients. We would like to see some improvement herein this statistic in the future. Finally, we looked at its number of hospitalizations. While it had 2.52 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted metric was close to the middle of the pack due to it having more complicated patients.

The next category we graded was nursing. We gave this nursing home a C in that area. Our nursing grade analyzes the facility's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. With 4 hours of nursing care per resident per day, this nursing home surpassed the national average. We also look at the skill levels of nurses and add more weight to hours worked by skilled nurses. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it fared well in this datapoint. This is typically a reliable indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a policy of turning patients more often.