Belle Fountain Nursing & Rehabilitation Center

One of the reasons this proved to be a quality nursing home is that it received a very impressive short-term care grade. In fact, short-term care is its best category. In that area, we gave this facility an A. In determining our short-term care ratings, we analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to create a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

In addition, this nursing home also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on the facility's inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A for that category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively minor. This place was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to create an imminent risk to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

This nursing home performed well in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. The nursing rating weighs many datapoints. The most important factor is the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients. This facility provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of turning a patient at least once a day.

Moving on to the fourth area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of D for long-term care. This is the nursing home's least impressive category rating. However, you should not focus exclusively one weak score. For prospective patients seeking a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are a key measure. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 97.87234 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this place also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.