Armour Care and Rehabilitation Center

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this facility really excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A. Few facilities performed better in this area. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this area typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also awarded this facility an impressive score in short-term care. This nursing home received a B in this category, which is one of our more favorable grades. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides more care with registered nurses to its residents than the average nursing home. The last item we considered in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

This facilities next best area is long-term care. We awarded it a grade of B- in this area. This is basically a middle of the pack grade in this category. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Frankly, we were a bit concerned this nursing home provided the vaccine to a relatively low 88.03419 percent of its patients. Nevertheless, this facility excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.47 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Our final category is nursing, where we awarded this facility a grade of C in that area. When computing a facility's nursing rating, we look at the number of hours nurses are with patients and the level of skill of the nurses. This place averages just 2.8 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, which is not an impressive total. Finally, we also baked some quality-based metrics into our nursing ratings. This nursing home was subpar in a few of the major metrics we focus on, with below average scores for minimizing its patients' pressure ulcers and major falls. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care provided.