Hiram W Davis Medical Center

With an overall grade this high, it should come as no surprise that this facility excelled in inspections, where it earned an A. Inspection grades weigh a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this category tend to have very few of these severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its high-end assessments in other areas, we gave this nursing home a score of A- for its short-term care grade. Short-term care grades are generally employed to score a facility's rehabilitation services. To offer highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. Nursing ratings are based in large part on nurse staffing levels. This facility provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning a resident even once per day.

The next area we analyzed is long-term care. We awarded this nursing home one of our more favorable scores in that category, with a B. Although this was not as favorable as many of its other grades, it is still a positive score. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 46.464645 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is a bit less than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, we were pleased to find facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.