Burnett Medical Center’s Continuing Care Center

To go along with its great overall score, we gave this nursing home an A for our inspections rating. Our inspection grades account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category tend to have very few of these severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, this turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. Our nursing rating is largely tied to a facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of moving patients even once per day.

We also would like to note the fact that this nursing home received a superb grade of A- in our long-term care area. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia can be a dangerous illness for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Turning to the fourth area, this facility received a high-end short-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of B+ in that area, completing one of our finer report cards. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The goal is to create a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.