Ballard Nursing Center

Ballard Nursing Center is a small facility located in Ada, Oklahoma. We awarded this facility an overall grade of C. A grade in this range requires some respectable marks. This grade is right in line with the city grade in Ada, which is admittedly a bit below average nationally. This place did not fare well in every category we looked at, but it did not receive any rock-bottom grades either. Additional information about these categories can be found below.

The main reason this facility received a decent overall grade is its impeccable government inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our better grades in that area, with a grade of A-. This is a much better grade than the place's overall grade, which was decent but not in the elite range. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better grades in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This nursing home was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This means that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to resident health or safety. A few minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. Nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility an B-. In computing a nursing home's nursing rating, we consider the number of hours nurses commit to patients and the levels of training of those nurses. This facility provided just 3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, our nursing grades also consider quality-based metrics, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this nursing home performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally a reliable indicator that a facility has quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses to assist its patients.

Unfortunately, this facility's third best score is long-term care. As it turns out, with a D in this area, it still performed relatively badly. Facilities that don't score well in this category often don't provide as much nursing care and also may be lagging in some of the areas of routine medical care we assessed. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. Candidly, we were a bit concerned this nursing home vaccinated 87.73006 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is significantly less than what we expected. To our surprise, this place was actually decent at limiting hospitalizations. While it had 1.9 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted score was not bad due to it having more complex patients. This is its best feature in this category

This facility's worst area was short-term care, which is the final area we assessed. For this category, we gave this facility a grade of D. Our short-term care grades are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a wide range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Considering its score in this category, we were not stunned to discover that this place is well below average in terms of its number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its patients based on the metrics we looked at. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 41.2 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.