Buffalo Prairie Center for Rehab and Healthcare

While this nursing home's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B- for that category, which is one of our better scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite insignificant. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. Lastly, this facility was flagged by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We prefer to avoid facilities with this designation. Please do your best to find an alternative nursing home.

We also wanted to note this nursing home's poor short-term care score where it received an F. Our short-term care grade is generally used to measure a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to have highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This definitely was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.

The next category we looked at is long-term care. This nursing home's received an abysmal long-term care score where it was given an F. When facilities receive this kind of score in long-term care it is typically a bad sign for resident care and it may mean that the facility is not as well-staffed. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. We found that this nursing home gave the vaccine to just 88.74172 percent of its residents, which is quite a bit lower than we expected. Surprisingly, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best feature in this category.

The final category we assessed was nursing, where this nursing home was given a bottom of the barrel score in this category also. Sadly, it received an abysmal F in this area, which is obviously a major disappointment. The nursing rating weighs a handful of components, many of which are based on levels of nurse staffing. This place offered a meager 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is well below average. To pair with its below average totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this nursing home had poor marks in several of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing grades. For starters, we looked at the percentage of residents sustaining falls which led to major injury. This facility was at more than 1.5 times the national average in this statistic. This is alarming in light of the fact that so many falls could be prevented with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the facility's fate of earning a poor nursing grade.