Hickory Creek at Connersville

Hickory Creek at Connersville is a small government-owned facility located in Connersville, Indiana. This is a decent nursing home with a B- overall grade. This grade is right in line with the city grade in Connersville. Based on our ratings, this nursing home has some redeeming qualities. One of the best aspects of this facility's profile is its exemplary inspection rating, which is addressed in the next section.

The primary reason this nursing home received a decent overall grade is its excellent government inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our better scores in that category, with an A+. This is a much better score than the facility's overall grade, which was decent but certainly not elite. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this facility had a few 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 CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

Additionally, we also would like to note that this facility was awarded favorable short-term care marks in this assessment. We gave them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. This turned out to be the facility's second strongest score. In determining these short-term care grades, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to create a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, we found that this nursing home provided respectable levels of physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident. The last item we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. It was above average in this area with 53.6 percent of its residents returning home.

We also gave this nursing home a decent score in the category of nursing care, with a grade of C. There are numerous subcategories included in this area. Most of these factors reflect the quantity of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides only 3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a somewhat alarming figure which is well below average. Lastly, we also baked some quality measures into our nursing scores. This nursing home was subpar in a few of the major areas we focus on, with below average scores for minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. These areas are generally decent measures of the quality of nursing care provided.

This nursing home's worst category is long-term care, which is the last category we looked at. For this category, we gave this nursing home a grade of just D. For residents in need of a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are a key measure. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Fortunately, this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents, which is an above average percentage. Surprisingly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 1.07 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.