Cordele Health and Rehabilitation

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Inspection ratings account for several factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better scores in this area typically have few of these severe deficiencies. While this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Additionally, we also wanted to point out that this facility received impressive long-term care marks in this assessment. We gave them one of our more favorable grades in that category, with a B. This proved to be the facility's second highest grade. When facilities receive this kind of score in this category it is a good sign for patient care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 99.528305 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We also awarded this facility a middle of the road score in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a grade of B-. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to measure a nursing home's rehabilitation services To offer good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide higher levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this nursing home provided information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

Switching gears to our final area, we gave this facility a grade of D for the area of nursing. This was the facility's weakest category rating. Of course, this grade hurt the nursing home's overall profile to some degree. There are a host of factors included in this area. Most of these criteria relate to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. With a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were well below average. In addition to receiving below average scores for nursing hours, this place was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of patients suffering pressure ulcers and found that this facility was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is a bad sign when you consider that so many pressure ulcers are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This statistic pulled down this facility's nursing grade substantially.