Decatur Medical Lodge

Although this nursing home's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the category of short-term care. We gave it a C for that category, which is a decent score. However, this was not enough to save its otherwise poor profile. Short-term care grades are typically used to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To have quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The key is determining what effect this had on the quality of care. The last item we assessed in this area is the number of patients that eventually returned home from the facility. We found that just 5.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This nursing home earned a grade of just D in the area of inspections. Unfortunately, this was its second best score. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. We suggest you pay close attention to the level of severity of the deficiencies. This facility was hit with 6 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we found is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they created a risk to resident safety or health. Finally, CMS flagged this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. This is not what you want to see. We advise you to direct your search elsewhere.

Sadly, this facility's next highest score is long-term care. However, with a D in this area, it still fared relatively badly. In a long-term care setting, the primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. Once we concluded our assessment of the volume of nursing care, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination data. We were pleased to learn that this facility vaccinated 99.187 percent of its residents for pneumonia. To our surprise, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

The final area we scored is nursing. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F for this category, which is an abysmal grade. There are a variety of subcategories within this grade. Many of these data points are tied to nurse staffing. This facility offered just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing scores. This place performed well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these data points to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.