Buffalo Prairie Center for Rehab and Healthcare

While we didn't give this nursing home a good overall grade, we did give it a strong grade in the category of inspections, where it earned a B+. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. It is typically in your best interest to avoid places that have a long list of severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This means that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

The next highest area we gave this nursing home in any area came in the area of long-term care, where we awarded it a grade of C. With our long-term care category, we look at the quantity of care offered by a nursing home, as well as some qualitative measures. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We were a bit concerned this facility provided the vaccine to only 65.44118 percent of its residents. On a more positive note, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We awarded this facility a grade of just D for our short-term care score. This is not a very good score. Our short-term care grades are likely most critical for patients in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. This means not only nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. With its grade in this category, we were not stunned to discover that this place was well below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its residents based on the figures we looked at. Frankly, this was what we expected here. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who returned home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

Moving on to our final area, we gave this facility a D in nursing. This is the nursing home's worst category grade. Our nursing score assesses the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the amount of time spent with patients. This place averaged just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is an alarmingly low total. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing ratings. This place performed well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.