Merit Health Wesley

Merit Health Wesley is a very-small hospital-based facility in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Featuring an overall grade of A+, this facility is one of the highest graded nursing homes in Hattiesburg, which features plenty of quality facilities. Based on our ratings, this nursing home is really as good as it gets. As you will find below, this place performed just as well in our category scores. We gave it a straight A report card!

In addition to receiving an elite overall score, this nursing home earned an A+ inspection grade. This grade is based on the facility's recent inspection reports. An A+ in this category is one of the highest complements we can pay to a nursing home. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are relatively insignificant. Unfortunately, it does not appear that we were able to find deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another reason we assessed this nursing home so highly is that it was given an A+ short-term care score. This is flat out as elite as it gets in this category. Short-term care ratings are critical for individuals looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates additional skilled nursing services. This means a broad scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. This nursing home excelled in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It offered about 50% more care from registered nurses and physical therapists than the typical facility. This is certainly a very favorable sign. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of facilities in this area with 71.3 percent of its residents returning home.

We also awarded this facility a grade of of A+ for its long-term care grade. For residents in need of a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccinations. It doesn't look like this facility provided data regarding vaccinations. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In the last category we rated, this facility was given a very strong grade of A- in our nursing category. With this score, the facility completed a straight A report card. We assessed the qualifications of nurses at the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours those nurses were with residents, in computing our score in this category. This nursing home provides an incredible 6.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day. Out of this total, many of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly highly trained levels of nurses. On top of providing impressive levels of nursing care, this place also excelled in the quality-based metrics we looked at. It performed as well as any facility in the nation in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.