J. Michael Morrow Memorial Nursing Home

We want to point out that this facility outperformed its overall score in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best scores in this category with an A. Our inspection grades are tied to many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this category tend to have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to point out that this facility received a strong long-term care grade. In fact, we gave it one of our best grades in that category with a grade of A. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia tragically can be a life or death ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility 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.

Another strength of this nursing home is its favorable grade in nursing. We gave them one of our better scores in that area, with an D. Our nursing grade is based on a variety of subcategories. The most heavily weighted variable is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.

This facility's weakest area is short-term care, which is the final area we scored. It received a lowly F in this category. Even with several acceptable scores in other categories, this grade is still concerning so we felt obligated to draw your attention to it. Short-term care grades are vital for residents requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires additional highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a vast spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. In this place's case, it looks like it provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the typical facility. The last datapoint we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients that were able to return home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 4.1 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was well below the national average.