Preton Health & Rehab Center

While this facility's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B- for that category, which is one of our better scores. We would argue that one of the most critical factors in evaluating an inspection report is deficiencies. We especially look at the severity of the deficiencies. This facility received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This means that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies an immediate risk to patient health or safety. Finally, CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

This facility also didn't fare too badly in the area of long-term care. In fact, we awarded it a grade of C for that category, which turned out to be another one of its higher scores. For prospective patients seeking a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are very important. After considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. We were disappointed to learn that this facility vaccinated just 55.555557 percent of its patients against pneumonia. On a more positive note, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Unfortunately, this facility only received a grade of D for its nursing grade, which was actually one of its better category grades. Our nursing score considers a number of datapoints. The most heavily weighted factor is the amount of time nurses spend with patients. This place averaged a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This figure is far below the national average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing ratings. This facility fared well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these datapoints to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.

The final area we scored was short-term care. This nursing home received a very poor grade of F in this category. Short-term care grades are typically employed to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To offer highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Based on its score in this category, we weren't surprised to discover that this nursing home was well below average in terms of its number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the metrics we looked at. Frankly, this was about what we expected here. The last item we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who returned home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 3.6 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was quite a bit below average.