Denison Nursing and Rehabilitation

Although we did not rate this facility favorably overall, we want to draw your attention to its excellent government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A- in this category. Our inspection ratings are based on pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important thing to look for on these inspections. You should especially avoid nursing homes with severe deficiencies linked to risks to resident well being. While this place had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

We also awarded this facility a grade of C for our nursing rating. The nursing score includes a handful of components, however, the main consideration is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In fact, it performed well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the number of hours of care offered.

Turning to the area of long-term care, this nursing home was given a grade of just D in that area. Facilities that do not fare well in long-term care typically are not as well-staffed and are lagging in some of the areas of routine medical care we looked at. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 81.25 percent of its patients. This is significantly below what we expected. To our surprise, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This is its best score in this category.

The final category we rated was short-term care, in which this nursing home was given a very poor score here also. It received a lowly F for this category, which is definitely a major disappointment. Our short-term care scores are critical for residents requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a broad range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. With a grade this poor for this category, we were not shocked to discover that this facility was well below average in two of the key staffing areas we focus on. The facility supplied substantially fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most nursing homes. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.