Haskell County Nursing Center

While we did not rate this facility favorably overall, we want to point out its relatively favorable long-term care rating this year. We gave it a B in this area. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is more than most nursing homes. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home's next best category came in the area of short-term care. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of C. In forming these short-term care grades, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our goal is to formulate a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. We found that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It supplied fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is still important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 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.

We awarded this facility a respectable grade in the area of nursing as well, with a grade of C. We assessed the qualifications of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time those nurses worked with patients, in calculating our rating in this category. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures. While this facility got dinged a bit for nursing hours per resident, it excelled in a few of these quality-based metrics. With fewer than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it did well in this statistic. This is generally an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a system of moving a resident more frequently.

The last category we looked at was inspections. This ended up being this facility's weakest link. We gave it a grade of just D in this category. Since this information is collected by government inspectors, we weight it heavily in our assessment. One of the most critical factors in evaluating an inspection report is deficiencies. We would pay close attention to the severity of the deficiencies. This particular facility was hit with 2 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we can say is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they posed a risk to patient safety or health. Finally, we need to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home was assessed large government fines in recent years of over $100,000. This usually suggests that a facility's bad performance spanned more than one year.