Peterson Park Health Care Center

While this place's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B- for that category, which is one of our better scores. Our inspection scores account for several factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This means the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

This nursing home really excelled in nursing, where it earned an B-. Few facilities performed better in this area. Our nursing score analyzes the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We consider both the levels of licensure of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with patients. This nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This figure is significantly below average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics. While this facility got docked a bit for its nursing hours, it actually excelled in a few of these quality metrics. With fewer than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed well in this statistic. This is typically an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving patients at least once a day.

Unfortunately, this facility's third highest category is long-term care. However, with a D in this area, it still performed relatively badly. When nursing homes receive this kind of grade in this category it is typically a bad sign for resident care and it may mean that the place is not as well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 86.52695 percent of its residents. This is multiple points below what we were hoping for. To our surprise, this place was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.05 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.

The next area we scored is short-term care, ended up being this facility's weakest area. We awarded this facility a grade of D in this category. In the category of short-term care, we endeavor to qualify measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. As you might expect, we found that this facility offers significantly less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the average nursing home. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 3.8 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.