Arnold Walter Nursing Home

To pair with its relatively modest overall score, we awarded this nursing home an A+ for its inspection grade. This grade is far better than the facility's overall grade. Our inspection ratings are tied to items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. 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. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

Additionally, we awarded this facility a B in our long-term care category. This is one of our more favorable scores. Facilities that do well in this category typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 98.53658 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly can be a dangerous health condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The third area we assessed was short-term care, where this nursing home was given a C in this area. Short-term care grades are typically used to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation In order to offer highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this facility submitted data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The last statistic we looked at in this category is the number of residents who ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that just 5 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The last area we assessed is nursing, which turned out to be this nursing home's weakest category. We gave this facility a D in that area. Naturally, this score hurt the nursing home's overall grade to some degree. Nursing scores are heavily correlated with nurse staffing levels. This facility offered only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. In addition to receiving below average scores for total nursing hours, this nursing home was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of residents suffering pressure ulcers and found that this nursing home was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this metric. This is a bad sign when you consider that many pressure ulcers are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This statistic really dragged down this facility's nursing score substantially.