Hendricks Community Hospital

On top of performing well overall, this facility earned an excellent inspection report. Consequently, it received one of our highest grades in this area with an A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively minor. While this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among its many dominant grades, this nursing home was awarded a strong long-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A in that category. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A- in our nursing category. Nursing ratings are based in large part on levels of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of turning a patient more often.

In our final area, this facility also was awarded an impressive short-term care score, with an A-. This wrapped up a very impressive report card. In forming our short-term care ratings, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our purpose is to devise a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final measure we assessed in this category is the number of patients who returned home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.