Falls City Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

To pair with its strong overall score, we gave this nursing home a grade of A- for our short-term care grade. In the category of short-term care, we try to evaluate indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Among this facility's other strengths is its elite nursing grade. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of A-. Nursing grades are based largely on quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home Nebraska in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of turning residents at least once a day.

In addition, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of B+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

Turning to our final category, this nursing home really did not fare very well. Due to a rock bottom grade of F in that area, this was notably this facility's weakest category grade. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in this category it is often a bad sign for resident care and it may indicate that the place is not as well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 92.125984 percent of its residents, which is somewhat lower than we were hoping for. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. This was its best score in this category.