Great Plains Nursing and Rehabilitation

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively minor. We weren't able to track down information about this nursing home's deficiencies. Without having access to information regarding deficiencies for this facility, it ended up being difficult to assess the place in terms of this category.

This nursing home 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. Facilities that receive this kind of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are well cared for. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a life or death illness for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility does not roll the dice on this issue. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. Nursing ratings are largely based on a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The last category we assessed was short-term care, where this facility received a B-. Even though this turned out to be its weakest category grade, this is still not a major area of concern. Short-term care scores are based in part on a facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a wide spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 4.9 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.