Pruitthealth - Shepherd Hills

In addition to being a strong nursing home overall, this nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of A+. Few facilities fared better in that area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively minor. While this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple relatively minor dings aren't necessarily something to panic about.

An additional quality feature for this nursing home is that it was given a very positive long-term care score. In fact, this proved to be its second best category score. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of B. When nursing homes receive this kind of grade in this category it is a good sign for patient care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 94.545456 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of B-. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. In calculating a facility's nursing score, we weigh the quantity of hours nurses are seeing patients and the level of licensure of the nurses. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, nursing grades also consider quality-based metrics, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this facility actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is typically an indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses to assist its residents.

The final area we assessed was short-term care. We awarded it a B- in that area. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this area. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we look at the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This category is often a useful assessment of the facility's rehabilitation. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this nursing home. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home.