Decatur Rehab & Health Care Center

Although this facility's overall score was terrible, it actually didn't perform as poorly in the area of nursing. We awarded it a grade of C for this area. The nursing grade consists of quite a few datapoints, many of which are tied to nursing hours. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a low total compared to most other nursing homes. Finally, our nursing scores also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this facility performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally a good indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses to assist its residents.

Additionally, we gave this nursing home a rock-bottom F in the category of short-term care. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to judge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Considering its grade in this category, we weren't stunned to discover that this place was well below average in terms of its number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its patients based on the metrics we assessed. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, about half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.

Unfortunately, this facility received an F for its inspection grade. This is an important category. Scores in this range typically point to some red flags on the facility's government inspection reports. For places with bad inspection grades, you should focus on any severe deficiencies found on their inspection reports. This particular nursing home was assessed 9 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we can say is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they posed a risk to patient health or safety. Finally, CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

The final category we graded was long-term care. This nursing home received a bottom of the barrel grade of F in that category. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 91.366905 percent of its patients, which is somewhat less than we anticipated. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. This was its best score in this category.