Groveton Nursing Home

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Inspection grades are tied to items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this category typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means 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. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also awarded this nursing home a score of A+ for its long-term care grade. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. One of the factors we considered after nursing hours was vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. This is a reliable method to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations for the nursing home population. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of C. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. Nursing grades are heavily correlated with nurse staffing levels. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a low total compared to most other nursing homes. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics. Although this place got docked a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of these quality measures. With fewer than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it fared remarkably well in this statistic. This is typically an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a system of turning patients at least once a day.

This nursing home's weakest area is short-term care, which is the last area we looked at. For this area, we gave this nursing home a grade of just D. We want to to draw your attention to this potential weak spot, however, you should not focus exclusively on one area either. Our short-term care grades are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a broad spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The last datapoint we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics sunk this nursing home's short-term care grade.