Black Hills Care and Rehabilitation Center

The primary reason this facility received a decent overall grade is its excellent inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our higher scores in that area, with a grade of A+. This is a notably better score than the facility's overall score, which was decent but not in the elite range. Our inspection scores are based on items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this area have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

This nursing home also excelled in the area of nursing, where it earned an B. Our nursing score assesses a handful of factors, many of which are associated with nursing hours. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home 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 generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

We also gave this nursing home a decent grade in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a B-. Our short-term care scores are thought to be more meaningful for residents requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically mandates additional skilled nursing. This means not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we considered in this category is the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 3.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.

The last category we scored was long-term care, was this facility's worst category. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in this area. This is one of the couple of dings in a very solid profile. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 97.10145 percent of its patients, which is better than the average nursing home. Surprisingly, this place also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.