Buchanan County Health Center

One of the reasons this place ended up being a great nursing home is it earned an A+ inspection grade. This is as good as it gets in this category. Our inspection scores are based on datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this area typically 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. This place was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also gave this nursing home a score of A+ for its long-term care grade. Facilities that do well in this category tend to provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. Once we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 97.76119 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is often a deadly condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A. Nursing scores are based in large part on quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The final area we rated is short-term care, where this facility received a grade of B+. This finished off a first-rate report card. Only a select few nursing homes received a B+ or higher in every category. Our short-term care scores are based on the facility's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a vast spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.