Belle Fountain Nursing & Rehabilitation Center

One of the reasons this ended up being a quality nursing home is that it received a very impressive inspection score. Inspections is its best category grade. In that category, we awarded it a grade of A. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

This facility performed well in the area of short-term care. Indeed, we gave it a score of A- for that area, which turns out to be one of our higher scores. Our short-term care grades are crucial for people requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a broad scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last statistic we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients that returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.7 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. This facility didn't perform quite as well in this category as it did in some other categories. Nevertheless, this is still a respectable score. Our nursing score assesses the facility's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of licensure of those nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. It performed well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the number of hours of care provided.

The next category we graded was long-term care. We gave this nursing home a D for the area of long-term care, leaving this as its least impressive grade. In a long-term care environment, the primary objective 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 patients. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.