Claiborne and Hughes Hlth Cntr

Although this place's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it didn't perform quite as poorly in long-term care. We awarded it a C for that category, which isn't bad. Unfortunately, this wasn't enough to salvage its otherwise poor profile. For prospective residents in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are a key measure. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Fortunately, this nursing home vaccinated 95.04373 percent of its patients, which is an above average statistic. Lastly, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We were also surprised to find that this facility received a decent nursing grade this year. We gave it a grade of C in that category. Our nursing grade analyzes several subcategories, however, the most important one is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place actually excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. It scored well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the number of hours of care offered.

We awarded this facility just a D for our short-term care score. This is not a very good score. Short-term care grades are typically employed to judge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation In order to have highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The final measure we considered in this area is the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 0 percent of its patients returning home.

The last category we looked at is inspections. Unfortunately, this ended up being this facility's worst grade. We gave it a score of D in this category. Since this data is collected by government inspectors, we weight it heavily in our overall grade. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. We suggest you scrutinize the severity of those deficiencies. This particular nursing home was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they created a threat to patient health or safety. Lastly, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this place received large government fines recently amounting to over $100,000. This usually suggests that a nursing home's bad performance spanned more than one year.