Circleville Center

This nursing home received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its excellent health inspections in recent years. We gave them an A in this category. Our inspection grades account for several factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better scores in this area generally have few of these severe deficiencies. This place was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

The next best category we gave this facility in any area came in the area of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of B-. Long-term care grades are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of care. This means a broad scope of personal care services, ranging from assistance with activities of daily living to routine medical services. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. We were pleased to discover that this nursing home vaccinated 99.46524 percent of its residents against pneumonia. The last datapoint we assessed was the facility's hospitalization rate. Here we found that this nursing home had 3.3 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. While this figure is somewhat concerning, this number can be skewed for some facilities due to the preexisting medical conditions of patients.

Another strength of this facility is its favorable grade in nursing. We gave them one of our better scores in that area, with an D. Our nursing score analyzes several components, many of which are based on nursing hours. This particular facility offered just 3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This number is quite a bit below average. On top of receiving below average scores for total nursing hours, this place was less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and found that this place was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this metric. This is a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic dragged down this nursing home's nursing grade significantly.

This nursing home's worst category was short-term care, which is the final category we looked at. In this area, we awarded this facility a grade of just D. In crafting these short-term care scores, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to formulate a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. In this facility's case, we found that it offers fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 44.6 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.