Smith County Health and Rehabilitation

Although we did not rate this nursing home highly overall, we want to point out its excellent government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A+ in this category. Our inspection grades account for a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. You generally want to avoid nursing homes with a bunch of severe deficiencies flagged. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider 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 necessarily the end of the world.

This facility's long-term care rating turns out to be one of its more favorable features. The facility was given a C in this area. If you are looking for anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care scores. One of the criteria we considered after nursing hours is vaccinations. We were a bit worried that this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to only 69.87952 percent of its patients. Nevertheless, this nursing home keeps its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

We also wanted to draw your attention to this facility's poor nursing grade where it received an F. We assessed the levels of nurses employed by the facility, in addition to the number of hours those nurses worked with residents, in computing our score in this area. This particular place offered a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This figure is far below the national average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing ratings. This nursing home fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The final category we graded was short-term care. This nursing home was given a poor grade of F in that area. Short-term care ratings are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a broad spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. With a score this poor in this area, we weren't surprised to discover this nursing home was well below average in many staffing figures we assess. In fact, it provided significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most other nursing homes. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 3.8 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.