Providence of Sparta Health and Rehab

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an excellent inspection score. In fact, its inspection grade was far superior to its overall score. In the inspections category, we gave this facility an A+. Inspection ratings are based on several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this area tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

This facility's short-term care score is one of its respectable grades. The facility was given a C in this area. In the area of short-term care, we endeavor to evaluate measures of a facility's rehabilitation services. We analyze a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Unfortunately, this place was below average in terms of its level of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the measures we assessed. The final statistic we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is actually below average.

This facility's second least favorable score is long-term care, where it received just a D in that area. This is a well below average score. For prospective patients in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility vaccinated 98.342545 percent of its residents, which is a very solid datapoint. Surprisingly, this facility also keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.

Moving on to our next area, we awarded this nursing home a D in the area of nursing. This was the facility's weakest category grade. In determining a nursing home's nursing grade, we look at the number of hours nurses are caring for residents as well as the levels of training of the nurses. 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. To go along with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this facility also didn't fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility. This could be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these statistics hurt this nursing home's nursing grade quite a bit.