Harrah Nursing Center

In addition to receiving a strong overall grade, this facility also earned an elite long-term care grade. We awarded them one of our higher scores in that category, with an impressive grade of A+. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 99.619774 percent of its patients, which is significantly higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on the facility's government inspections. In fact, we gave it an A for that category. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with better grades in this category typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The next category we analyzed was short-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of D. This is nowhere near as strong as its other category grades. Indeed, this is well below average. In our short-term care assessment, we endeavor to forge a sound measure for rehabilitation. In this process, we assess a facility's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational 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 final measure we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics was damning for this facility's short-term care score.

The last category we looked at was nursing. We awarded this facility a D for nursing, making this its weakest category grade. The nursing grade is based on a handful of subcategories, most of which are tied to nursing hours. This place averaged just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Although this facility's nursing hours were below average, it actually surprised us in some of the qualitative data points in this category. In particular, we were pleased to find that its residents appear to be suffering fewer pressure ulcers than most nursing homes.