Brickyard Healthcare – Petersburg Care Center

This nursing home received a strong overall grade as described above, but we especially wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless government inspections in recent years. We gave them an A in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively insignificant. While this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

Adding to its strong performance in other categories, we gave this facility an B for nursing. Nursing scores are mostly associated with the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place Indiana in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a policy of turning residents more often.

This facility is also strong in the category of long-term care, where it received a grade of B. It outpaced most nursing homes in this category. If you are looking for services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care ratings. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 75.59524 percent of its residents. This is a few points lower than we were hoping for but still a reasonably acceptable figure. 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 an impressively low number.

The final area we looked at is short-term care. We awarded this nursing home a grade of B- in that area. Our short-term care scores are vital for prospective residents needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a vast range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we considered in this category is the number of residents that returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.