Bolivar Medical Center Long Term Care

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection ratings are based on many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this category typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Our nursing rating is mostly based on the facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving a patient even once per day.

This nursing home also received an A+ for its long-term care grade. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. One of the factors we considered after nursing hours was vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 97.72727 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a great way to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the nursing home population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In the final area, we awarded this facility an A+ for our short-term care score. This wrapped up a very strong profile. Our short-term care scores are considered to be most critical for individuals needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not only nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home 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 facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.