Symphony of Dyer

This nursing home really excelled at short-term care, with an A in this category. This really propped up its overall grade. Short-term care grades are typically employed to grade a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This nursing home is above the national average both in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents. These are generally good indicators of quality short-term care. The final measure we assessed in this category is the number of residents who were able to return home from the facility. We found that it performed as well as just about any facility in Indiana in this area with 63.3 percent of its residents returning home.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. This proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we awarded this nursing home an B+. Our nursing grade is largely tied to the facility's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided 5.5 hours of nursing care per patient each day, which is among the highest totals in the country. A significant portion of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the more skilled levels of nurses. We are very impressed by both of these statistics. On top of looking at levels of nursing care, we also looked at a few quality measures in determining our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these datapoints as predictive indicators of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

It should also be noted that this facility's inspection score was strong as well. In fact, we awarded it a B for its inspection reports, which is one of our better scores. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection ratings. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite insignificant. While this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are rare in the industry.

The next category we looked at is long-term care. It received an F for this area, which is a rock bottom score. This is obviously a major concern. When facilities receive this kind of score in long-term care it is a bad sign for patient care and it may indicate that the facility is not as well-staffed. This nursing home's vaccination data weren't as impressive as its nursing hours data. This facility gave the pneumonia vaccine to just 86.56716 percent of its patients. We would love to see some improvement in this area in the future. To our surprise, this facility was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.