Childress Healthcare Center

To go along with its decent overall grade, we awarded this nursing home an A for its inspection grade. This grade is far better than its overall rating. Inspection scores account for a host of factors included in a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this category generally have very few of these severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This nursing home's next highest area was its long-term care score, where it was awarded a C. In determining our long-term care scores, we assess the facility's ability to maintain its permanent residents' health and quality of life. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccinations. Fortunately, this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. This place keeps its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The third category we analyzed was short-term care, where this facility was given a C in this category. Our short-term care grade is often used to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation To have good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Unfortunately, we found that this facility provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The final metric we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that just 5 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.

This facility's worst area is nursing, which is the last category we looked at. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F for this area. In spite of a few respectable scores in other categories, this grade is nevertheless alarming so we felt obligated to draw your attention to it. We scrutinized the licensure of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the quantity of hours the nurses worked with patients, in computing our grade in this area. This nursing home provides 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. In addition to performing badly in terms of nursing hours, this facility also had terrible scores in the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing grades. For starters, we looked at the percentage of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This facility was at more than double the national average in both of these data points.