Perry County Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

On top of performing well in its overall grade, this facility performed at an even higher level in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A+. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home really excelled in the area of long-term care, where it received a score of A-. Very few nursing homes performed more favorably in this area. Facilities that excel in this category tend to provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a proven method to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. Our nursing category analyzes a handful of components, many of which are tied to quantities of nurse staffing. This nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is a relatively low total compared with most facilities. Finally, despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally an indicator that a place has quality controls in place.

This facility's weakest area is short-term care, which is the last area we assessed. Unfortunately, we gave it an F for this area. Even with multiple strong grades in other categories, this grade is still somewhat of a concern so we wanted to point it out. Our short-term care scores are arguably more meaningful for residents in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires additional highly-skilled nursing services. This means not merely nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This definitely wasn't a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.