Reagan County Care Center

The main reason this ended up being a decent nursing home is that it earned an elite inspection score. Its inspection grade was far superior to its overall grade. In the inspections category, we gave this facility an A-. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should point out that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

This facility also received a strong grade in our short-term care category. We awarded this facility a better than average grade of B in that category. Our short-term care grades are probably most critical for individuals needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates additional highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not just nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final item we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. Our nursing grade focuses on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home averages just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Finally, our nursing grades also consider quality-based measures, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this place performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is typically a reliable indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses to assist its residents.

Switching gears to our final category, we gave this facility a grade of D for our long-term care category. This is the nursing home's worst category rating. Unfortunately, this score pulled down the facility's overall profile to a certain degree. When nursing homes receive this kind of grade in this category it is typically a bad sign for resident care and it may mean that the place is not as well-staffed. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 85.106384 percent of its residents. This is significantly less than what we were hoping for. To our surprise, this nursing home actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.