Nixa Nursing & Rehab

On top of being a great facility overall, it also received A+ inspections in recent years. Its inspections were nearly perfect. Inspection scores weigh a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher grades in this category generally have few severe deficiencies. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means that CMS didn't 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 gave this nursing home a grade of A- for our long-term care grade. Facilities that excel in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 97.19101 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is often a life or death illness for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility does not roll the dice on this issue. Finally, 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 figure.

Turning to an additional strength for this facility, we gave them one of our higher scores in our short-term care category as well, with a B+. Our short-term care grade is typically used to score a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation To have highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents that returned home from this nursing home. We found that 6.3 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

The final area we scored was nursing. In this area, we gave this facility a solid grade of C. This actually is this nursing home's least impressive area. Our nursing score is based on a variety of data points. The most important variable is the amount of time nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a lower figure than we were hoping for. Lastly, although this place got dinged a bit for nursing hours per resident, it excelled in a few of our quality-based measures. With fewer than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it did remarkably well in this subcategory.