Fulton Nursing & Rehab

This nursing home's best category grade came in the area of inspections. In this area, we gave this facility a grade of B+. It actually outperformed most facilities in this area. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection ratings. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some can be relatively insignificant. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This nursing home's second highest category turned out to be its short-term care score, where it was awarded a B-. Our short-term care ratings are probably more important for folks in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically requires additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, this facility was below average in terms of its number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. The last metric we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.

This nursing home's third most favorable area turned out to be its long-term care grade, where it was given a grade of C. In the area of long-term care, we analyze the amount of care provided by a nursing home, rather than more medically-intensive services. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 89.94414 percent of its patients. This is significantly less than what we were hoping for. Nevertheless, this nursing home was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The next category we scored is nursing, which ended up being a weak spot for this facility. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in the area of nursing. Our nursing score focuses on the facility's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of training of the nurses and the number of hours spent with patients. With only 0.2 hours of nursing care per patient daily, this place's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below the national average. In addition to performing poorly in terms of nursing hours, this nursing home also had rock bottom scores in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing grades. For starters, we looked at the percentage of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This place was at more than double the national average in both of these data points. This is quite alarming when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This ended up sealing this nursing home's fate of receiving a very poor nursing grade.