Bland County Nursing & Rehabilitation Center

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it received an elite inspection score. Its inspection grade was far better than its overall score. In our inspections category, we gave it an A+. Inspection ratings are based on several pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

Another one of this nursing home's more favorable category grades came in the category of long-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a B. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 96.95122 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is too frequently a life threatening health condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. This place was also able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 1.63 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days.

Sadly, this nursing home's third highest category was short-term care. Nevertheless, with a grade of D in this area, it still fared relatively poorly. In determining our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This area is considered to be a reliable measure of a facility's rehabilitation. Surprisingly, this nursing home provided more physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most facilities. Clearly its shortcomings were more quality-based. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This wasn't a strength for this facility. We found that just 47.5 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this is below average.

The next category we graded was nursing, which turned out to be a low point for this facility. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in our nursing category. In determining our nursing scores, we factor in both staffing levels and the skill levels of the nurses. The problem with this nursing home was apparently more based on quality of care than quantity of care. Based on the data, it looks like this place provides an above average 4.1 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. Out of this total, nearly one quarter of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which are one of the most highly skilled levels of nurses. Despite performing well in terms of nursing hours, this facility was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and found that this place was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic pulled down this facility's nursing grade substantially.