Ephraim Mcdowell Regional Medical Center

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this nursing home has received near flawless inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A+ in this category. Our inspection scores are based on several pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. We weren't able to find deficiency data for this facility. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its profile, this facility also received a score of B+ for its short-term care rating. This is a well above average grade in this category. Short-term care grades are typically employed to judge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To offer high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. We were not able to track down information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. Our nursing score consists of many components, but the primary one is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provided 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Turning to the final category, this facility was awarded an extremely favorable long-term care rating. We awarded it a B+ in that area, completing one of our more impressive profiles. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down this facility's vaccination rates. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.