Hickory Creek at Connersville

We want to draw your attention to the fact that this facility outperformed its overall grade in the category of inspections. In fact, it received an excellent government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in this area with an A+. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This facility was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies to create an immediate risk to resident health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

Additionally, we gave this facility a B in our short-term care category. This happens to be one of our more impressive scores. Our short-term care ratings are likely more important for people needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The next best category we gave this nursing home in any category came in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of C. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is higher than the majority of nursing homes. This nursing home was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The final category we looked at was nursing, is this facility's weakest category. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in that area. This is one of just a couple of weak links of a strong report card. When calculating our nursing grades, we assess both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This statistic is far below the national average. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing ratings. This nursing home performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.