Phillips County Retirement Center

This place performed well in the area of long-term care, where it earned an impressive grade of A. When nursing homes receive this type of score in long-term care it is typically a good sign for resident care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 94.5946 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We also want to emphasize this place's nearly flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this area. Our inspection grades account for several factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this area typically have few severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS didn't consider 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 always a good sign.

Our next area we analyzed is short-term care, in which this nursing home received an F. Our short-term care grades are presumably most important for folks requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not only nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Given its score in this category, we weren't surprised to find that this place is well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the figures we looked at. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The next category we scored is nursing, which turned out to be this facility's weakest category. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F in this category, which is clearly concerning. When determining a facility's nursing grade, we look at the amount of time nurses are with residents as well as the levels of training of the nurses. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. To pair with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility also did not fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This place had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average nursing home. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these metrics pulled down this facility's nursing grade quite a bit.