Pruitthealth - Shepherd Hills

This facility received a very good grade in our short-term care rating. In fact, we awarded it a B for that category, which is one of our better scores. Short-term care ratings are crucial for individuals looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically mandates higher levels of skilled nursing. This means a broad scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. This nursing home employs both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities employ these skilled professionals. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This proved to be a real strength for this nursing home. This place outperformed the vast majority of facilities in the nation with 64.6 percent of its patients returning home.

We gave this facility a C for inspections. This is more respectable than the nursing home's overall grade. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be quite minor. This nursing home was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were category G through L deficiencies. This indicates CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Unfortunately, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received significant government fines in recent years.

As it turns out, this nursing home only received a D for its long-term care score, which is not a score to write home about. Nursing homes that receive this type of score in long-term care likely don't provide the kind of consistent 24/7 care that some other facilities provide. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 93.64162 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which happens to be somewhat lower than we expected but still a respectable figure. The last statistic we assessed was the facility's hospitalization rate. Here we found that this facility had 1.85 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is a higher hospitalization rate than the average nursing home, but it is not quite as bad as we expected.

This facility's weakest area is nursing, which is the last category we assessed. In this category, we awarded this facility a grade of D. There are a variety of factors included in this category. Most of the subcategories are tied to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 2.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We looked at the percentage of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This place had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average facility. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. These metrics hurt this nursing home's nursing rating quite a bit.