Galax Health and Rehab

To go along with its relatively modest overall grade, we gave this nursing home an A for its inspection grade. This grade is far more impressive than its overall score. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This place received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

This nursing home also was given a strong long-term care grade. In fact, we gave them a grade of B in this category, which happens to be one of our more favorable scores. In a long-term care setting, the primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. Once we concluded our assessment of the amount of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 83.87097 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Next we looked at nursing grades, where this nursing home received an F, which is a rock bottom grade. This area was definitely not a strength for this facility. The nursing rating assesses many factors, many of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. With just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily, this place's nurse staffing levels were far below the national average. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. This facility fared well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

Turning to our final category, this nursing home didn't perform very well. With a bottom of the barrel grade of F in short-term care, this was this facility's poorest category grade. Short-term care scores are vital for patients needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more skilled nursing services. This includes a vast spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 4.6 percent of this facility's patients returned home.