Dierks Healthcare & Rehabilitation Center

Dierks Healthcare & Rehabilitation Center is a small nursing home located in Dierks, Arkansas. We gave this facility an overall grade of C. A grade in this range requires some solid marks. You can certainly do worse than this place. The best part of this nursing home's report card is its exemplary inspection rating. Inspection grades are discussed in the next section.

We want to point out that this nursing home really outperformed its overall score in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our best scores in this area with an A. Our inspection grades are based on many datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this area typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. This is a good sign for this facility.

One of this facility's more respectable category scores came in the category of long-term care. This proved to be its second most respectable category. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B-. Long-term care grades assess a facility's personal care instead of the highly skilled therapy or healthcare services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Fortunately, this facility administered the vaccine to 98.12207 percent of its residents, which is a very solid figure. Finally, we looked at the facility's number of hospitalizations. Here we found that this facility had 2.34 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, this figure was not quite as favorable than its other scores in this category.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. Nursing grades are tied to quality and quantity of nursing care. This particular nursing home provided 3.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based metrics, such as preventing major falls. This place performed admirably in this statistic. Avoiding major falls is generally a good indicator that a facility has quality controls in place. Some falls can be prevented if a nursing home offers enough nurses to assist its patients.

The final category we rated is short-term care, which turned out to be this facility's weakest area. We gave it a lowly F in this category, which is certainly very disappointing. Our short-term care ratings are arguably most critical for those requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically mandates higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. With its weak rating in this area, we weren't surprised to discover that this nursing home provides far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most other facilities. The final metric we considered in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to return home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 25.2 percent of its patients returning home.