The Springs of Searcy

While this nursing home's overall grade was not a highlight, it actually excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Inspection scores are based on several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key item to look for on these inspections. You should especially avoid nursing homes that have severe deficiencies associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

One of this nursing home's better category scores came in the area of long-term care. This turned out to be its second most respectable category. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of C. In the category of long-term care, we weigh the quantity of services provided by a facility, rather than more medically-intensive services. We would have to do a little more research into this facility before opining further on this category as it looks like we are missing a few metrics for long-term care.

Sadly, this facility's third best score was short-term care. However, with a grade of D in this category, it still fared relatively poorly. Our short-term care grades are believed to be most meaningful for patients needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically mandates more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Based on its poor rating in this category, we were not surprised to discover that this facility offered substantially fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most facilities. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely was not a strength for this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, about half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.

Moving on to the fourth category, this facility didn't fare well in this category either. With an abysmal grade of F in nursing, this is about as bad as it gets. Our nursing grade is largely associated with a facility's nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, to round out our nursing grade, we turn to some quality-focused statistics in rounding out our nursing scores. Specifically, we look at the percent of patients who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.