Harrodsburg Health & Rehabilitation Center

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this facility really excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned a grade of A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. These inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was awarded an impressive long-term care grade. Indeed, we gave them a grade of B+ in that category, which is one of our better. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. Once we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a life threatening ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Moving on to another strength for this facility, it also received an elite nursing rating. In fact, we gave this facility an D. In computing our nursing scores, we analyze both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing ratings. This place fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these datapoints to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This facility's least impressive area was short-term care, which is the last category we scored. In this area, we gave this facility a D. Short-term care grades are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a vast range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, we learned that this place provides fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most facilities. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics doomed this nursing home's short-term care score.