Tower Lodge Care Center

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. These inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility fared well in the area of long-term care. Indeed, we gave it a score of A for that area, which turns out to be one of our most impressive grades. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. After we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 94.94949 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is often a life threatening condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility does not leave this to chance. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but a grade in this range is not the end of the world. There are numerous datapoints included in this category. Most of the datapoints relate to staffing levels. This facility provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we were hoping for. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures. While this facility got dinged a bit for nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of these quality metrics. With less than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it did well in this statistic. This is generally an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of turning a resident more frequently.

The last area we looked at is short-term care. This nursing home was awarded a strong short-term care rating in our assessment, with a grade of C. While this isn't nearly as strong as many of its other grades, this remains an acceptable grade in this area. In computing our short-term care scores, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The goal is to devise a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this nursing home submitted information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. The last measure we looked at in this area is the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.