Nhc Healthcare, West Plains

To pair with its strong overall performance, we awarded this facility an A for the area of inspections. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies aren't something to panic about.

Adding to this nursing home's list of accomplishments, it also was awarded a fine short-term care grade. We gave them a dominant grade of A- in this area. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our purpose is to create a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. It does not look like this facility provided data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. There are a number of datapoints within this category. Most of the datapoints are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The next area we assessed is long-term care. We awarded this nursing home one of our higher scores in this area, with a grade of B. This facility proved to be relatively strong in all areas we analyzed. Facilities that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 95.98214 percent of its residents, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia tragically can be a life or death illness for nursing home patients so we like it when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.