The Lodge at Tangi Pines

On top of earning a great overall rating, this facility fared even better in our inspections category which is based on the nursing home's recent government inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A+ for this category, which is one of our highest scores. Inspection scores are tied to many pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this area tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Contributing to this facility's list of accomplishments, it also was given a first-rate long-term care score. We gave them an elite grade of A in this category. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 99.73404 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a life threatening illness for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Turning to the area of nursing care, this was not one of this facility's strong suits. We awarded it a grade of D in this category. Clearly, this facility performed much better in the categories discussed above. Our nursing rating analyzes a handful of components, but the paramount one is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home offered just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing ratings. This nursing home performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The final area we scored is short-term care. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this category, which is an abysmal grade. We would not necessarily dismiss a facility because of one bad grade though. Our short-term care scores are thought to be more important for individuals requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The final metric we looked at in this category is the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 3.8 percent of its residents returning home.