Comer Health and Rehabilitation

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this nursing home performed at an even higher level in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A+. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite insignificant. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home is also strong in the category of long-term care, where it was awarded a score of B+. It performed better than most nursing homes in this category. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in long-term care it is a good sign for resident care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 99.64789 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a life or death illness for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The next category we looked at is short-term care. In that category, we awarded this facility a B-. Short-term care grades are vital for individuals in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a broad spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. We weren't able to track down information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

Switching gears to our final area, this facility received a respectable nursing grade of C. The nursing grade includes many factors, but the main one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics. Although this nursing home got docked a bit for its nursing hours, it actually excelled in a few of these quality-based metrics. With fewer than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this metric. This is typically an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a system of moving a resident even once per day.