Pruitthealth - Fitzgerald

With an address in Fitzgerald, Georgia, Pruitthealth - Fitzgerald is one of a mere two nursing homes in this city. This nursing home was given an overall score of F. Based on our assessment, you would be better off to steer clear of this facility. More information on this nursing home's category grades may be found below. Its best category was inspections, which is discussed in the next section.

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 grade of B- for that category, which is one of our better scores. We believe that one of the most critical factors in assessing an inspection report is deficiencies. In this regard, we especially focus on the severity of the deficiencies. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Lastly, this nursing home was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. This is generally a really bad sign. We would never recommend this facility.

Surprisingly, we awarded this nursing home a grade of C for our short-term care grade, which is not a bad grade. In forming these short-term care ratings, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our goal is to formulate a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. In this nursing home's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the average facility. The hope is always that this does not adversely affect the quality of care. The last metric we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. It was respectable in this metric with 46.1 percent of its residents returning home.

Another unfortunate development is the F this facility received in the area of long-term care. In a long-term care setting, the primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility provided the vaccine to 97.65258 percent of its patients, which is an above average percentage. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

The last category we scored is nursing. This nursing home received a rock bottom grade of F in that category. The nursing rating assesses a handful of components, but the primary consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provides 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is slightly below average. In addition to performing poorly in terms of nursing hours, this facility also had terrible scores in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing ratings. For starters, we looked at the percentage of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This place was at more than double the national average in both of these metrics. This is quite alarming when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This ended up sealing this facility's fate of earning a very poor nursing grade.