Preton Health & Rehab Center

The primary reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it received an elite inspection score. In fact, its inspection grade was far better than its overall grade. In our inspections category, we gave this facility an A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite minor. This place was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered severe. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

Another strength of this nursing home is its first-rate score in long-term care. We awarded them one of our best scores in that category, with a score of A-. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 81.94444 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which happens to be a bit lower than we were hoping for but still a decent figure. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Another strength of this facility is its favorable grade in nursing. We gave them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of D. Our nursing rating includes many datapoints, but the primary one is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing grades. This nursing home performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these datapoints to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we scored was short-term care. We gave it an F in this area, which is a very poor grade. This is obviously a significant concern. In determining our short-term care scores, we scrutinize the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This area is typically a meaningful measure of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. With its grade in this category, we were not stunned to discover that this nursing home was well below average in terms of the quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its patients based on the measures we looked at. Frankly, this was about what we expected to find. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 3.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. At most facilities, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.