Cabell Health Care Center

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this nursing home performed at an even higher level in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility really excelled in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a score of A-. Very few facilities performed more favorably in this area. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 99.02913 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is significantly higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. This facility didn't perform quite as well in this category as it did in some other categories. Nevertheless, this is still a respectable score. Our nursing grade includes a host of subcategories. The most important variable is the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, nursing ratings also consider quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this facility performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is typically a reliable indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a facility supplies enough nurses aids to assist its residents.

The next area we analyzed is short-term care, which proved to be this nursing home's least impressive category. It received a lowly F in this area, which is certainly a bit concerning. Our short-term care ratings are considered to be most critical for patients needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we learned that this place offered less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The final metric we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who ultimately returned home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 3.8 percent of its residents returning home.