Purcell Care Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a decent facility is that it received a very favorable inspection grade. In this area, we awarded this facility a B+. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This particular nursing home received 10 deficiencies on its inspection report. Overall, this is still a solid inspection report, but we'd always recommend looking into any deficiencies you find troubling.

This nursing home was awarded its second best category grade in the area of long-term care. We gave this nursing home a grade of B- in this category, which is a respectable score. In the category of long-term care, we focus more on the quantity of care offered by a facility, as opposed to more medically-intensive services. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Fortunately, this facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is a very respectable percentage. This nursing home keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home's next most favorable area is its short-term care grade, where it was awarded a grade of C. Short-term care scores are important for residents looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires more skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a broad scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. In this place's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than a typical facility. The final measure we looked at in this category is the number of residents that returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.

The last area we rated is nursing, which is this nursing home's least impressive category. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in this category. In calculating our nursing ratings, we assess both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of those nurses. With a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, this place's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below average. In addition to rating below average in nursing hours per resident, this place also had poor scores in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in both of these statistics. This is a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These scores helped pull down this facility's nursing grade quite a bit.