Haralson Nursing & Rehabilitation Center

The main reason this facility received a decent overall score is its impeccable inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our higher grades in that area, with an A+. This is a notably better score than the facility's overall grade, which was decent but not in the elite range. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This facility received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to create an immediate risk to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

This facility also received a strong long-term care score. Indeed, we gave them a B+ in this category, which happens to be one of our more favorable scores. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 98.58357 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to another strength for this facility, it also earned an elite nursing grade. We gave this nursing home a score of D. Our nursing grade features a number of datapoints. The most heavily weighted variable is the amount of time nurses spent with patients. This place averaged just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is not a very impressive figure. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing grades. This facility fared well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these datapoints to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.

The last area we analyzed was short-term care, which proved to be this nursing home's worst area. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this area, which is clearly a major concern. In computing our short-term care scores, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to formulate a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.2 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.