Culpeper Health & Rehabilitation Center

Culpeper Health & Rehabilitation Center is a facility located in Culpeper, Virginia, a city with a population of 31,444 people. With an overall rating of B-, this appears to be a decent nursing home. This facility has some things working in its favor. One of the better aspects of this nursing home's report card is its impressive inspection score, which we will address in the next paragraph.

This facility earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its nearly flawless health inspections in recent years. We gave them an A- in this category. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. A couple relatively minor dings aren't something to panic about.

We also would like to note that this facility received a strong short-term care score. In fact, we gave it one of our most favorable grades in that category with a grade of A-. Short-term care grades are typically employed to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To have highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. One of this nursing home's strengths is physical therapy hours. We found that it offers more hours with physical therapists to its residents than most facilities. The final datapoint we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that it performed as well as just about any facility in Virginia in this area with 58.3 percent of its residents returning home. Unfortunately, at most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home in any area came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. Nursing ratings are mostly based on a facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home averages just 3.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Finally, although this place got dinged a bit for nursing hours, it excelled in some of our quality measures. With less than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this subcategory.

The next category we looked at is long-term care. We gave this facility a D in our long-term care category, rendering this the nursing home's least impressive category grade. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 97.73585 percent of its residents, which is higher than the majority of nursing homes. To our surprise, this facility was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 1.46 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.