Clarion Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center

To go along with its relatively modest overall grade, we awarded this nursing home an A+ for its inspection grade. This is far better than its overall rating. Our inspection ratings are tied to many datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this category typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This nursing home received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to be an imminent threat to resident health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

We also awarded this nursing home a strong score in short-term care. This nursing home earned a grade of B+ in this category, which happens to be one of our more favorable scores. With our short-term care score, we endeavor to forge a valuable measure for rehabilitation. In this process, we analyze a facility's scope of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents that returned home from this facility. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. The nursing score weighs several components, most of which are associated with nursing hours. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility actually excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In fact, it performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the number of hours of care provided.

The last category we looked at was long-term care, which proved to be this facility's worst area. We gave this facility a D in that area. Naturally, this grade hurt the nursing home's overall profile to some degree. For prospective residents looking for a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are a key measure. After considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is more than the vast majority of nursing homes. To our surprise, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.