Hot Springs Health & Rehabilitation Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Our inspection scores account for several factors included in a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better scores in this category generally have very few of these severe deficiencies. This place was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered severe. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to be an imminent risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Additionally, this nursing home also was given favorable long-term care grades this year. In fact, we gave them one of our stronger scores in that category, with a score of B+. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it generally means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 93.91304 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia sadly is often a dangerous health condition for nursing home residents so we like it when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B+. We analyzed the qualifications of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses were with residents, in determining our grade in this category. This nursing home provides 0.3 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 place Montana in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of turning a resident at least once a day.

Moving on to the fourth area, this facility was awarded a respectable short-term care rating. Even though this is not nearly as elite as a few of its other scores, this is truly nothing to be ashamed of. Our short-term care ratings are probably more critical for patients needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically mandates more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. The last item we looked at in this category is the number of residents that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.