Pruitthealth - Marietta

While this facility's overall grade was not bad, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our best scores. Inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this facility had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

The second highest area we awarded this facility in any area came in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of C. In determining our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This grade is more often than not a reliable measure of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. We were surprised to find that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we focus on. In fact, it offered fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. It is important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 4.9 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

We awarded this nursing home a grade of just D for our long-term care rating. This is not a very good score. If you are seeking services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care grades. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 98.181816 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.

Moving on to our fourth area, we gave this facility a grade of D in nursing. This is the nursing home's worst category rating. When calculating our nursing scores, we weigh both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of the nurses. This nursing home offered only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is an alarmingly low total. In addition to receiving below average marks for nursing hours, this place was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and found that this nursing home was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this metric. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that so many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This statistic really dragged down this facility's nursing score substantially.