Pierre Care and Rehabilitation Center

With an address in Pierre, South Dakota, Pierre Care and Rehabilitation Center is one of a mere two available facilities in this city. Featuring an overall score of F, we consider this to be a very poor nursing home. Based on our assessment, you'd be better off to avoid of this facility. Finally, inspections was the lone shining light in this nursing home's profile. We provide more information on this category below.

While we gave this place a terrible overall score, we gave it a grade of B+ for our inspections category. This was the result of the facility receiving a decent government inspection report this year. Our inspection grades are based on several datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important thing to look for on these reports. Most importantly, you should avoid nursing homes that have severe deficiencies associated with risks to resident well being. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

Turning to the area of nursing care, this facility received a grade of just D in this category. Unfortunately, this ended up being one of its better grades. There are a variety of datapoints within this area. Many of these subcategories reflect nurse staffing. This nursing home offered just 2.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This figure is significantly below average. Finally, we also looked at some quality measures in computing our nursing grades. This nursing home was above average in two of the major statistics we considered, with good scores for avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. These areas are often good measures of the quality of nursing care provided.

Unfortunately, this facility's next highest score was long-term care. However, with a grade of D in this area, it still performed relatively poorly. For long-term care residents, 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. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 96.38009 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this place was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 1.34 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.

The next area we rated is short-term care. We gave it an abysmal F for this category, which is a very poor grade. In our short-term care grade, we attempt to forge a sound barometer for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess the facility's levels of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. With a grade of this caliber in this category, we weren't surprised to discover that this nursing home was well below average in multiple staffing areas we focus on. The facility provided significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most facilities. The final measure we assessed in this area is the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 36.9 percent of its residents returning home. This was quite a bit below the national average.