Pioneer Care Center

Pioneer Care Center is a small government-owned nursing home in Brigham City, Utah. We gave this nursing home an overall grade of B. A grade of this caliber requires quality scores in most areas. Based on our assessment, this facility looks like a good fit for most people. You also may want to review this facility's category grades below. short-term care grades are discussed in the next paragraph.

In addition to being a quality facility overall, this facility really excelled in the area of short-term care, where it received an impressive grade of A+. Our short-term care grades are believed to be most meaningful for patients requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. This facility excelled in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It offered more care from physical therapists and registered nurses than the average nursing home. This is generally an excellent sign. The final item we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it performed as well as just about any facility in Utah in this area with 65.7 percent of its patients returning home.

This nursing home also performed well in inspections. It earned a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. It received one of our highest scores in that category with an A-. Few facilities with an overall score in this range performed this well in multiple categories. Inspection ratings account for a host of factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this category tend to have few of these severe deficiencies. This place was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. This facility didn't perform quite as well in this category as it did in some other categories. Nevertheless, this is still a respectable score. Our nursing category assesses a handful of datapoints, many of which are associated with nursing hours. This place provides 3.7 hours of nursing care per patient each day. Out of this total, more than one quarter of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the more highly trained levels of nurses. We attach more significance to these skilled nursing hours in preparing our nursing grades. Lastly, our nursing grades also factor in some quality-focused statistics. Specifically, we look at the percent of residents who sustained pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as predictive measures of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The last area we analyzed was long-term care, which was this facility's worst category. It received an F in this area, which is certainly a bit of a concern. For prospective residents seeking a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 98.49624 percent of its residents, which is better than the average nursing home. Surprisingly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Although it had 1.74 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, its risk adjusted metric was not bad due to it having some more complex patients.