Claiborne Healthcare Center

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an excellent inspection grade. In fact, its inspection score was far superior to its overall grade. In the inspections category, we gave it an A. These inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. You can not go wrong with a deficiency-free inspection report.

This nursing home also received a positive score in our long-term care category. We gave this nursing home a better than average grade of B+ in that category. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia tragically can be a deadly ailment for nursing home patients so we like it when a nursing home doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. When computing our nursing scores, we analyze both staffing levels and the skill levels of those nurses. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics. While this place got dinged a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in a few of these quality measures. With less than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it did very well in this metric. This is typically an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a system of moving a resident even once per day.

The next area we scored was short-term care, is this nursing home's worst area. We gave this nursing home a D in this category. This really was one of just a couple of weak links on an otherwise strong profile. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. It looks like this place was subpar in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the staffing figures we looked at. The last statistic we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics doomed this nursing home's short-term care score.