Prairie Grove Health and Rehabilitation

In addition to being a first rate nursing home overall, this facility also fared well in our long-term care category, where it earned an impressive grade of A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. Facilities that excel in long-term care tend to provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia can be a life or death condition for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Turning to another one of this place's strengths, it also earned a very impressive inspection grade. Inspections proved to be one of its best category grades. We awarded this facility an A. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Surprisingly, this nursing home was hit with a category L deficiency, which is not what we expected given its inspection grade. This category means inspectors found a widespread deficiency putting resident health or safety in immediate jeopardy. Even a single deficiency in this category is concerning. In spite of this major red flag, other aspects of this facility's inspection report gave us some hope.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. When computing a facility's nursing rating, we look at the amount of time nurses are caring for residents and the levels of training of those nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The final category we rated was this facility's worst category. Nevertheless, even in its weakest link we still gave it a decent grade of B- in short-term care. With our short-term care grade, we attempt to forge a valuable measure for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we assess a facility's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this nursing home provided information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. The final statistic we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.