Dawson Springs Health and Rehabilitation Center

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a grade of B- for our short-term care rating. Our short-term care ratings are thought to be more meaningful for those requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually mandates more skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not only nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. We were surprised to find that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It supplied fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is still important to determine whether this is adversely impacting the quality of care. The final statistic we assessed in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is below average.

We were also surprised to learn that this facility earned a reasonably solid long-term care rating this year. We gave it a grade of B- in this category. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary objective 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 patients. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 99.03381 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is more than the average nursing home. This facility was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We were stunned to find that this facility also excelled in the area of nursing. In fact, we gave it an D for that category, which is one of our best grades. The nursing score includes a variety of datapoints. The most heavily weighted variable is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. With a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day, this place's nurse staffing levels were well below the national average. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. This facility performed well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these datapoints to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.

Moving on our final category of inspections, this nursing home received an abysmal grade. When a facility has this poor of an inspection rating, you should expect some severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to resident safety. This particular nursing home had a deficiency by government inspectors. We were relieved to find that it was not in one of the categories that suggest that it created a threat to resident safety or health. Lastly, this nursing home was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. This is generally a really bad sign. We would never recommend this facility.