Decatur Wellness & Rehabilitation Center

We want to point out that this facility really outperformed its overall score in the category of inspections. In fact, it received an excellent government inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our highest grades in that category with an A-. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

Additionally, we gave this nursing home a B in our long-term care category. This is one of our higher grades. If you are looking for services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care ratings. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 90.90909 percent of its patients, which is a few points lower than we expected. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of C, which is a decent grade. Nursing ratings are largely tied to the facility's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This figure is significantly below average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. It scored well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

The final area we scored was short-term care. We gave it an abysmal F for this area, which is a very poor score. This is certainly a major concern. In computing our short-term care ratings, we look at the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This category is more often than not a useful assessment of the nursing home's rehabilitation. With its grade in this area, we were not surprised to discover that this facility was well below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the metrics we assessed. The final statistic we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 0 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was well below the national average.