PruittHealth - Pickens

On top of earning a quality overall grade, this facility also received excellent inspections recently. We gave it one of our highest scores in that category, with a grade of A. Our inspection ratings are tied to several datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home received a dominant grade of A in our short-term care area. Short-term care grades are typically used to measure a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic 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.

This facility also received a first-rate long-term care score. In fact, this is this nursing home's third strongest category grade. In that area, this facility received a grade of A-. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses, we turned to the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 99.28571 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a life threatening condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In the last category, this nursing home also was awarded a very strong nursing rating, with a grade of B+. This wrapped up a very strong report card. Our nursing rating considers a host of data points. The most heavily weighted factor is the amount of time nurses spend with patients. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.