Palmer Healthcare Center

This nursing home received a quality overall score as described above, but we especially would like to point out its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We gave it an A in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively insignificant. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility is also strong in the category of long-term care, where it was given a score of B. It performed more favorably than most facilities in this category. For prospective patients seeking a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 82.35294 percent of its residents. This is a few points lower than we expected. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. This facility didn't perform quite as well in this category as it did in some other categories. Nevertheless, this is still a respectable score. When calculating a facility's nursing grade, we consider the amount of time nurses are seeing patients and the level of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, our nursing scores also consider quality-based measures, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this facility performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is typically an indicator that a facility has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls can be avoided if a facility supplies enough nurses to assist its residents.

Our next area is short-term care, in which we awarded this nursing home a B- in this area. In the category of short-term care, we endeavor to qualify measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. We weren't able to locate information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. The last metric we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.