Carthage Health and Rehabilitation Center

The primary reason this nursing home received a decent overall score is its excellent health inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our better grades in that category, with an A. This is a notably better score than the facility's overall score, which was decent but not in the elite range. Inspection scores account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher grades in this category usually have very few severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

Another one of this facility's higher category grades was in the area of long-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a B. Facilities that receive this kind of score in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to make sure residents are kept in good health. Once we finished looking at the volume of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly is often a life or death ailment for nursing home patients so we like it when a nursing home doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

One of this facility's better category grades was in the area of nursing care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of C. Nursing scores are heavily correlated with nurse staffing levels. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a much lower figure than we were hoping for. Finally, our nursing scores also factor in quality-based metrics, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this facility performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally a good indicator that a facility has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses aids to assist its residents.

The final category we assessed is short-term care, which is this nursing home's worst category. We awarded this facility a grade of D in this category. Of course, this category hurt the nursing home's overall profile to some degree. Our short-term care ratings are meaningful for residents in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a wide range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. It looks like this place was below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the measures we looked at. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. At most facilities, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.