Fayette Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be relatively insignificant. It does not appear that we have deficiency data for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Contributing to this nursing home's list of strengths, it also was given a fine long-term care grade. We gave them an elite strong of A- in this category. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. After we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 99.4709 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is often a life threatening illness for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't take any chances. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents 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.

Turning to the category of nursing care, this facility didn't perform quite as well in this area as some of the categories discussed above. Nevertheless, a grade of B- in this category is by no means a bad score. Our nursing score looks at the facility's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of training of the nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place actually excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In fact, it scored well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the number of hours of care provided.

The final area we assessed was short-term care, where this facility was awarded a grade of B-. This actually was this facility's weakest area. This is still not a poor grade. In determining our short-term care grades, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to formulate a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we considered in this area is the number of patients that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 5.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.