Fulton County Medical Center

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. Nursing grades are based in large part on quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this place 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 Pennsylvania in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as employing a policy of turning a resident at least once a day.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this nursing home excelled in the category of inspections, where it earned an A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Our inspection scores account for a host of factors included in a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this area tend to have few of these severe deficiencies. While this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily something to panic about.

We also want to emphasize the fact that this facility was given a strong grade of A- in our short-term care category. In the area of short-term care, we seek to qualify indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We analyze the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

The next category we analyzed was long-term care, in which this facility was given a grade of B. Although this ended up being its worst category grade, this is nevertheless an impressive score. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly can be a life threatening health condition for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.