Falls City Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

With an address in Falls City, Nebraska, Falls City Nursing and Rehabilitation Center is one of a mere two nursing homes in this city. We gave it an overall grade of C, which is a middle of the road score. In our view, this facility would be a good fit for most people. One of the best aspects of this facility's report card is its remarkable inspection rating, which is addressed in the next paragraph.

This facility received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We gave them an A+ in this category. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This facility was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that the inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

This nursing home also received a favorable long-term care grade. In fact, we awarded them a grade of B+ in that category, which is one of our better. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 98.47328 percent of its patients, which is better than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Moving on to another strength for this facility, it also received an elite nursing score. In fact, we gave this facility a grade of D. The nursing category consists of several components, many of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This place offered a meager 2.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. On top of its below average nursing hours, this place also earned suboptimal scores in several of the quality-based measures we considered in computing our nursing scores. We found that a higher percentage of this place's residents sustained falls leading to serious injury. We would argue that many falls could likely be prevented with better nursing care. This metric contributed to this place receiving a poor nursing grade.

The last category we graded is short-term care, was this facility's least impressive area. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in this category. In determining these short-term care ratings, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to create a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Based on its grade in this category, we weren't surprised to learn that this facility was well below average in terms of the number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the data we assessed. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who who were able to eventually return home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 32.4 percent of its residents returning home. This was well below average.