Independence Care Center of Perry County

To pair with its strong overall score, we gave this facility an A+ for the area of inspections. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better grades in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home received strong scores in the category of long-term care as well. Consequently, it received one of our best grades in that category with a area of A-. When facilities receive this type of score in this category it is a good sign for resident care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 98.81657 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly is often a dangerous condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home does not take any chances. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of C. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but a grade in this range is not the end of the world. We looked at the licensure of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours the nurses spent with residents, in calculating our score in this area. This nursing home provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a somewhat alarming figure which is well below the national average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. It scored well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the number of hours of care offered.

The final area we scored is short-term care, which was this facility's worst area. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in that area. Naturally, this score hurt the nursing home's overall profile a bit. In determining our short-term care grades, we look at the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This grade is frequently a meaningful measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation services. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The last statistic we looked at in this area is the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4.5 percent of its patients returning home.