Country Arch Care Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great facility is that it received a very impressive short-term care grade. In fact, this turned out to be its best category. In that category, we gave this facility an impressive grade of A. In the category of short-term care, we strive to qualify measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We analyze a facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Adding to this nursing home's impressive resume, we awarded this facility an A for our inspections rating. Our inspection ratings are tied to items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. There are numerous criteria included in this area. Most of the criteria reflect staffing levels. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a system of turning a patient more often.

Switching gears to our fourth area, this facility received an acceptable long-term care grade. While this isn't quite as impressive as a few of its other scores, this is really not the end of the world. Our long-term care grade focuses on a facility's personal care instead of the skilled nursing and medical services that are critical to a skilled nursing facility. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this nursing home gave the vaccine to a relatively low 84.276726 percent of its residents. Fortunately, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.