Park Rest Hardin County Health Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a strong nursing home is that it received a very impressive long-term care rating. This was its best grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A+. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 80.136986 percent of its residents. This is somewhat below what we anticipated but still a respectable percentage. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections. We gave it an A+ for that category. Arguably the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of C. 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. In calculating our nursing scores, we analyze both staffing levels and the skill levels of those nurses. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This figure is significantly below the national average. Lastly, our nursing ratings also consider quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is usually a good indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses to assist its residents.

Moving on to the last category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of D in our short-term care category. This was the facility's worst category score. Unfortunately, this category pulled down the facility's overall grade to some degree. Short-term care scores are important for patients requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing services. This means a wide spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.