Pruitthealth - Shepherd Hills

Pruitthealth - Shepherd Hills is an average-sized nursing home located in La Fayette, Georgia. Featuring an overall score of B-, this looks like a decent nursing home. Based on our assessment, there are certainly far worse nursing homes out there. One of the best aspects of this facility's profile is its remarkable inspection reports, which we will address in the next section.

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 highest scores. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This place was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Additionally, we awarded this nursing home a B+ in our long-term care category. This happens to be one of our more impressive scores. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 91.43577 percent of its residents. This is a bit lower than we anticipated but still a respectable figure. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.94 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Another strength of this nursing home is its favorable grade in nursing. We gave them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of D. Our nursing score looks at the facility's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This facility provided just 3.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. On top of receiving below average scores for total nursing hours, this place was less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of residents suffering pressure ulcers and found that this place was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this metric. This is a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic really pulled down this facility's nursing grade significantly.

The next category we looked at is short-term care, which proved to be this facility's worst area. We gave this facility a D in that area. Unfortunately, this score hurt the facility's overall profile to some degree. In our short-term care rating, we try to craft a sound barometer for rehabilitation services. In this process, we assess a nursing home's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. In this place's case, it looks like it provides fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the average facility. The final datapoint we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 40.6 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics sunk this nursing home's short-term care grade.