Arkansas Convalescent Center

While this facility's overall grade was decent, it really fared well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our best scores. Our inspection grades are tied to datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this category have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This nursing home was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies to create an immediate threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

This nursing home also performed favorably in the category of long-term care, where it received a score of A-. Few nursing homes fared more favorably in this category. If you are seeking anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care grades. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 38.912132 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is slightly lower than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Clearly, this facility 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 one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Next we wanted to quickly point out one of this facility's major weaknesses. In the area of nursing care, we gave this nursing home a lowly grade of F. In computing a facility's nursing grade, we look at the quantity of hours nurses are caring for patients as well as the level of licensure of the nurses. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing scores. This facility fared well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

The final area we rated was short-term care, which proved to be this nursing home's weakest category. We gave it a lowly F in this category, which is clearly concerning. In determining our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This area is generally a reliable assessment of the facility's rehabilitation. Based on its score in this area, we were not surprised to discover that this facility was well below average in terms of its number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the metrics we looked at. Frankly, this was about what we expected to find. The final item we assessed in this area is the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 3.4 percent of its residents returning home.