Baptist Health Medical Center-Little Rock

We also wanted to point out that this facility earned near flawless inspections recently. We gave them an A+ in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively insignificant. 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. A deficiency-free inspection report is what we like to see.

This nursing home really excelled in the category of short-term care, where we gave it a score of A. Very few facilities performed better in this category. In determining these short-term care scores, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The goal is to formulate a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this facility provided data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.8 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. When computing a nursing home's nursing grade, we weigh the number of hours nurses spend with patients and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The final area we looked at is long-term care, which is a low point for this facility. We gave this facility a D in our long-term care category, leaving this as the facility's worst category grade. We would nevertheless suggest that you look at the bigger picture. Nursing homes that receive this kind of score in this category likely don't provide the type of consistent 24/7 care that some other facilities offer. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccinations. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this facility submitted data regarding vaccinations. To our surprise, this facility actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.