Benchmark Healthcare of Puryear

One of the reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it earned an impressive inspection score. Inspections is its best category. In this category, we gave it an A. These inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among this facility's other strengths is its high-end long-term care score. We awarded them one of our strongest grades in that category, with a grade of A. Facilities that do well in this category tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 97.77778 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. The nursing grade weighs a number of subcategories. The most heavily weighted one is the amount of time nurses spend with patients. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a relatively low total compared with most nursing homes. Lastly, despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this facility actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally a reliable indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place.

The next category we scored is short-term care. We awarded this facility a D in short-term care, making this the nursing home's worst category. Short-term care scores are meaningful for prospective residents in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a vast range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, this nursing home was subpar in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the data we considered. The last item we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics was damning for this nursing home's short-term care grade.