Bennett County Hospital and Nursing Home

While this facility's overall grade was decent, it really fared well in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. 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. This is definitely a good sign for the quality of care at this facility.

This nursing home's next best category was short-term care. We gave it a B- in this area. This is basically a middle of the pack score in this area. Short-term care grades are typically used to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To have high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This nursing home elevated its grade in this category by offering more care from registered nurses to its residents than the average facility. The last statistic we assessed in this area 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 returned home, which is actually below average.

Another strength of this facility is its favorable grade in nursing. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with an D. The nursing rating assesses several factors, many of which are tied to quantities of nurse staffing. This facility offered just 2.8 hours of nursing care per patient per day. In addition to performing badly in terms of nursing hours, this facility also had terrible marks in the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. For starters, we looked at the percent of residents experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This place was at more than double the national average in both of these datapoints.

The last category we looked at is long-term care, which turned out to be this facility's least impressive area. We gave this nursing home a D in that category. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it generally means the nursing home didn't perform well in our quality measures relating to resident care. After considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. We were somewhat surprised to discover that this facility vaccinated only 71.01449 percent of its residents for pneumonia. To our surprise, this nursing home actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 1.25 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.