Elkins Regional Convalescent Center

The main reason this ended up being a decent nursing home is that it earned an elite inspection score. Its inspection grade was far superior to its overall score. In the inspections category, we gave this facility an A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection ratings. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some can be quite minor. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

In addition, we gave this nursing home a B in our long-term care category. This happens to be one of our more impressive scores. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia is too frequently a deadly condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home does not leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The third area we looked at was short-term care, where this nursing home was given a grade of C in this area. Short-term care grades are often used to grade a facility's performance with rehabilitation In order to offer highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of patients who eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.

Moving on to our final area, this facility was awarded a respectable nursing grade of C. Our nursing rating looks at the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of training of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides only 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a somewhat uninspiring figure which is well below average. Finally, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this facility actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally a reliable indicator that a facility has sufficient quality controls in place.