Ararat Nursing Facility

This nursing home really fared well in the area of long-term care. In fact, we awarded it an A- for that area. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B+. Our nursing grade is mostly based on a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving a resident at least once a day.

This facility's next highest category is its short-term care grade, where it received a C. In computing our short-term care ratings, we size up a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This score is often a useful assessment of the facility's rehabilitation services. It doesn't look like this nursing home provided registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from this facility. We found that 1.9 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was well below the national average.

The last category we looked at is inspections. This did not end up being one of this nursing home's stronger areas. We gave it a D in this category. Since this data is collected by government inspectors, we take it very seriously. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. We suggest you pay close attention to the severity of the deficiencies. This nursing home was hit with 3 deficiencies by CMS. The only favorable thing we found is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they caused a threat to patient safety or health. Finally, we need to draw your attention to the fact that this place received significant government fines totaling more than $100,000. This generally suggests that a nursing home's poor track record spanned more than one year.