AHC Lewis County

While this nursing home's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the category of short-term care. We gave it a B- for that category, which is a decent score. That said, this was not enough to salvage its overall profile. Our short-term care grades are thought to be most meaningful for folks requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not only nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. In this nursing home's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the typical facility. The hope is that this does not adversely affect the quality of care. The last item we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. This figure was below the national average.

We awarded this nursing home a grade of just D for our long-term care rating and that actually ended up being its second most favorable score. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. After looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination statistics. Candidly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this nursing home vaccinated 90.39039 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which happens to be significantly below what we were hoping for. Surprisingly, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.

This facility's next best category was nursing, but even there it received a grade of just D. This is still a well below average grade. Our nursing rating focuses on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of skill of those nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This place offered a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is not a very impressive figure. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing ratings. This facility fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these metrics to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.

In our last category of inspections, this facility received an abysmal grade. You should pay close attention to any deficiencies on a facility's inspection reports when it receives this bad of an inspection score. We recommend you pay close attention to the level of severity of the deficiencies. This particular facility had 4 deficiencies by CMS. The only positive thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they caused a risk to patient safety or health. Lastly, this facility was flagged by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We prefer to avoid facilities with this designation. Please do your best to find an alternative nursing home.