Dawson Health and Rehabilitation

The primary reason this facility received a decent overall grade is its impeccable inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our higher grades in that area, with a grade of A+. This is a notably better score than the place's overall score, which was decent but not in the elite range. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another one of this facility's more impressive category scores came in the category of long-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a B+. It actually performed better than most facilities in this category. If you are looking for anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care scores. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 75.82417 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is a few points below what we were hoping for but still a reasonably acceptable figure. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, we were pleased to find nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Moving on to another strength for this facility, it also earned an elite nursing grade. In fact, we gave this nursing home a grade of D. We assessed the levels of nurses working for the facility, in addition to the number of hours the nurses spent with patients, in calculating our score in this category. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing ratings. This place fared well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Turning to our last area, we awarded this facility a grade of D for our short-term care category. This was the facility's least impressive category score. Naturally, this grade hurt the nursing home's overall profile to a certain degree. In computing our short-term care grades, we assess a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This area is generally a useful assessment of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. In this facility's case, it looks like it provided less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the typical facility. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 4.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.