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.

Contributing to its strong profile, this nursing home also was given a dominant short-term care score, with a grade of A-. With our short-term care assessment, we try to craft a fair barometer for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we look at the nursing home's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

In addition, this facility also earned excellent government inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our best grades in that area, with a score of A-. Inspection grades are based on many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

Moving on to our next area, this nursing home was given a respectable long-term care score. Even though this was not nearly as dominant as several of its other scores, this is still not a poor grade. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 98.16514 percent of its residents. Finally, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.