Carthage Healthcare Center

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a B- for our inspections rating. In fact, the facility received very impressive inspection report this year. Inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This facility was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to create an immediate threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

Unfortunately, this facility's next highest category is long-term care. Nevertheless, with a D in this category, it still performed relatively poorly. In a long-term care environment, the primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. After looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. We were pleased to learn that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.

As it turns out, this nursing home only received a D for its short-term care rating, which is not a very good score. In the category of short-term care, we try to assess measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. With a score of this caliber in this category, we weren't surprised to discover that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing figures we looked at. The nursing home offered far fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The last metric we considered in this category is the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 0 percent of its patients returning home.

Switching gears to the fourth area, this nursing home really didn't perform very well here either. With a bottom of the barrel grade of F in nursing, this is about as terrible as it gets. The nursing rating consists of several factors, but the paramount one is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. To pair with its subpar 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 calculating our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of patients sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average nursing home. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. These metrics hurt this facility's nursing rating quite a bit.