Richardton Health Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. These inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and 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 safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Our nursing rating consists of quite a few datapoints, many of which are associated with nursing hours. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of of A+ for its long-term care grade. Facilities that excel in this category tend to provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In the final category we scored, this nursing home was awarded a very strong grade of A- in our short-term care category. With this grade, the nursing home rounded out a straight A report card. In the category of short-term care, we endeavor to evaluate measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We analyze a facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.