Grace Health and Rehab Center of Greene County

While we were not high on this nursing home overall, we awarded it an A for our inspections rating. This score is significantly more impressive than the facility's overall score. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. It is typically in your best interest to avoid places that had a long list of severe deficiencies. While this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

Moving on to the area of long-term care, this facility was awarded just a D in that area. Unfortunately, this wound up being one of its better features. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in this category it is a bad sign for resident care and it may mean that the nursing home is not as well-staffed. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Frankly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this nursing home provided the vaccine to just 50 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This was its best feature in this category.

Sadly, this nursing home only received a grade of D for its short-term care rating, which is not a very good score. Short-term care grades are meaningful for prospective residents in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a vast scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. With a score this poor in this category, we weren't stunned to discover this facility was below average in several staffing figures we focus on. In fact, it provided far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The last statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 5.3 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics sunk this facility's short-term care grade.

The next area we assessed was nursing, where this facility received a rock bottom grade in this area also. Sadly, it received an F for this area, which is definitely somewhat alarming. When computing a nursing home's nursing grade, we assess the quantity of hours nurses are caring for patients and the level of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. On top of receiving below average scores for nursing hours, this facility was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing grades. We looked at the percentage of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and found that this place was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in this metric. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that so many pressure ulcers are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This statistic pulled down this nursing home's nursing score significantly.