Perry County Nursing Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was not bad, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our best scores. Inspection grades are tied to several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. This is really what you want to see on an inspection report.

This nursing home also received an impressive short-term care score. In fact, we gave it a grade of B in this category, which is one of our better. Our short-term care ratings are likely most meaningful for individuals requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

We also awarded this facility a favorable grade in nursing. This facility earned a grade of B in this category, which is one of our better grades. We scrutinized the qualifications of nurses at the facility, as well as the quantity of time those nurses worked with residents, in calculating our grade in this area. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a system of moving residents more frequently.

This nursing home's least impressive category is long-term care, which is the last category we looked at. In this area, we awarded this facility a D. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. Once we finished looking at the quantity of nursing care, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. We were optimistic to find that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia. To our surprise, this nursing home also keeps its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.