Donnellson Health Center

Even though we graded this nursing home incredibly poorly overall, it received a decent short-term care score this year. We gave it a C in that category. In forming these short-term care grades, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our goal is to formulate a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Unfortunately, we found that this place provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. The more important thing is determining what bearing this had on quality of care. The final metric we assessed in this category is the number of residents who were able to return home from the nursing home. This facility performed better in this statistic. We found that it fared better than most nursing homes in this area with 51.6 percent of its residents returning home.

Unfortunately, this facility only received a grade of D for its nursing grade, which was actually one of its better category grades. Nursing scores are largely based on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This place provided only 3.1 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is well below average. In addition to ranking below average in nursing hours per resident, this place also had poor marks in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This place was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in both of these datapoints. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These metrics helped pull down this nursing home's nursing rating significantly.

Sadly, this facility received a grade of just D in our inspection category. This is well below average grade. Our inspection scores account for several factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. Generally, you should be especially cautious when considering a facility with severe deficiencies on its inspection reports. This particular nursing home was assessed 5 deficiencies by CMS. The only favorable thing we found is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they posed a threat to resident safety or health. Finally, we need to point out that this place received large government fines recently of more than $100,000. This often signifies that a facility's poor track record has been an issue for more than one year.

The final area we analyzed was long-term care. This nursing home received a bottom of the barrel grade of F in this area. Nursing homes that don't fare well in long-term care typically aren't as well-staffed and are lagging in some of the areas of routine medical care we assessed. After assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. Unfortunately, this nursing home vaccinated only 67.0391 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this place actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 1 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.