Newton County Nursing Home

We also wanted to point out the fact that this facility has received near flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this area. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with better grades in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also would like to emphasize the fact that this facility was given an elite grade of A- in our short-term care area. Our short-term care grade is typically used to gauge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of patients that were able to return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

We also want to alert you to the fact that this nursing home was given a superb grade of A- in our long-term care area. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 90.196075 percent of its residents, which is a bit below what we expected. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, at least this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next area we rated is nursing. This nursing home received a very good nursing grade this year, with a grade of B. Although this wasn't quite as dominant as several of its other grades, this remains one of our better scores in that category. The nursing score weighs many data points, however, the main one is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also factored a few quality-based metrics into our nursing grades. This place was relatively weak in two of the major areas we focus on, with below average scores for minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care provided.