Braden River Rehabilitation Center

On top of being a quality nursing home overall, this place also excelled in our inspections category, where it earned a grade of A+. Not many facilities performed better in that area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively insignificant. This facility was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This means that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies to be an imminent threat to resident health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies are not something to panic about.

We also gave this nursing home a score of A- for our long-term care grade. When facilities receive this kind of grade in this category it is a good sign for resident care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 99.06542 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but a grade in this range is not the end of the world. Nursing grades are primarily tied to the nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a low total compared with most other facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place surprisingly fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In fact, it performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the quantity of hours of care offered.

The next category we scored was short-term care, which turned out to be this nursing home's worst area. We awarded this facility a grade of D in that area. Naturally, this category pulled down the facility's overall grade to some degree. Short-term care ratings are important for residents in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes more skilled nursing. This includes a vast spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.