Avantara Pierre

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a grade of B- for our short-term care rating. In crafting our short-term care ratings, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to formulate a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Unfortunately, we found that this facility provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents that returned home from this facility. We found that 5.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually well below average.

This nursing home performed well in inspections as well. We awarded it a grade of B- for that category, which is a fairly impressive grade. We believe that one of the most important factors in assessing an inspection report is deficiencies. We especially focus on the severity of those deficiencies. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

The third category we looked at was long-term care. This nursing home's was given a poor long-term care score where it was given an F. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary objective 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 patients. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. We were optimistic to discover that this facility vaccinated 94 percent of its patients for pneumonia. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

The final area we analyzed was nursing, in which this nursing home received a bottom of the barrel score here also. Sadly, it received an abysmal F for this category, which is definitely somewhat alarming. Nursing ratings are heavily correlated with levels of nurse staffing. With only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day, this facility's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below the national average. On top of performing badly in terms of nursing hours, this nursing home also had rock bottom marks in the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing grades. For starters, we looked at the percentage of residents experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This place was at more than twice the national average in both of these metrics. This is quite alarming when you consider that many falls and bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. This ended up sealing this facility's fate of receiving a very weak nursing rating.