Carter Nursing & Rehabilitation Center

Carter Nursing & Rehabilitation Center is the lone option we identified in Grayson, Kentucky. Featuring an overall grade of C, this is likely a middle of the road facility. Based on our analysis, there are certainly much worse nursing homes out there. You also may want to review this facility's category grades below. We discuss long-term care in the next paragraph.

This facility fared well in our long-term care category, with a grade of A- in this category. This really helped its overall grade quite a bit. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. After considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. Finally, we looked at the facility's number of hospitalizations. We found that this facility had 2.94 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. While this admittedly wasn't as impressive as some of its other scores in this category, this number may be skewed for some facilities due to the preexisting medical conditions of residents.

This facility also performed well in inspections. As a result, it received one of our best scores in that area with a score of B+. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively minor. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

The next area we assessed is short-term care, where this nursing home was given an F. Our short-term care grades are believed to be most critical for those in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires more highly-skilled nursing. This means not just nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Given its grade in this area, we weren't stunned to learn that this facility was well below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the data we assessed. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 35.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics doomed this nursing home's short-term care grade.

The final area we looked at is nursing. Sadly, it received an abysmal F in this category, which is an abysmal grade. This is obviously a significant disappointment. The nursing grade includes several data points, however, the most important consideration is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home averaged only 3.2 hours of nursing care per patient per day. To pair with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this place also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This place had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average nursing home.