Fort Gaines Health and Rehab

In addition to being a strong facility overall, it also earned A+ health inspections recently. Its inspections were nearly flawless. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be relatively minor. This place received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to pose an immediate risk to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This exemplary facility also was superb in the area of long-term care, where it received a grade of A+. Few facilities fared better in this area. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 98.8764 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a proven method to avoid unnecessary deaths for the elderly population. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 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. Nursing grades are based largely on levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, we also looked at several nursing quality measures. While this nursing home got dinged a bit for nursing hours, it excelled in some of these quality-based measures. With fewer than five percent of its patients experiencing pressure ulcers, it fared very well in this area. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving a patient at least once a day.

This nursing home's weakest category was short-term care, which is the last area we assessed. In this area, we awarded this facility a D. We would like to to draw your attention to this possible area of weakness, however, you shouldn't dwell on one area either. In our short-term care category, we endeavor to forge a meaningful measure for rehabilitation. In doing so, we look at the facility's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. It appears that this nursing home was subpar in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the data we considered. Finally, we assessed the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.