Battle Mountain General Hospital

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ in the area of long-term care. When facilities receive this type of score in this category it is typically a good sign for patient care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our nursing grade. Our nursing score is mostly based on the facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility also performed well in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. It earned one of our highest grades in that category with a grade of B+. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with better grades in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The final area we rated is short-term care. In that area, we gave this facility an acceptable grade of B-. This actually proved to be this facility's worst area. In determining our short-term care scores, we assess a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This grade is considered to be a reliable assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. Unfortunately, it does not look like this facility submitted information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. The last metric we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.