Adams County Nursing Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a strong nursing home is that it earned an impressive inspection score. Inspections is its best category. In that category, we awarded it an A. Our inspection grades weigh a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better scores in this category typically have very few severe deficiencies. It does not appear that we were able to find deficiency data for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility was given high scores in the category of long-term care as well. Indeed, we awarded it one of our most favorable grades in that category with a score of A-. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in this category it is usually a good sign for resident care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is significantly higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of C. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. Our nursing rating analyzes a handful of datapoints, but the paramount one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This place provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also looked at several nursing quality measures. Although this nursing home got dinged a bit for nursing hours per resident, it excelled in a few of these quality-based metrics. With fewer than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed remarkably well in this metric. This is often an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a system of turning a resident even once per day.

The next area we graded was short-term care, which turned out to be this facility's weakest category. We awarded this facility a grade of D in that category. Of course, this category hurt the facility's overall grade a bit. In determining our short-term care scores, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The purpose is to devise a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. We found that this nursing home was subpar in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the data we looked at. The last measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4.3 percent of its residents returning home.