Ruleme Center

The primary reason this facility received a decent overall grade is its impeccable inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our higher scores in that category, with an A. This is a notably better grade than the facility's overall grade, which was decent but not in the elite range. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this place had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor dings are not necessarily something to panic about.

We also gave this facility a strong grade in short-term care. This facility received a grade of B in this area, which happens to be one of our more impressive grades. Short-term care grades are generally employed to gauge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. Finally, we looked at the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. It performed as well as just about any facility in this area with 61.5 percent of its residents returning home. Most facilities are below 50 percent in this statistic.

This nursing home's third best category turned out to be long-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a C. For prospective patients in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. We were optimistic to discover that this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia. This place was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 1.12 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a much lower hospitalization rate than the average nursing home.

This nursing home's worst area is nursing, which is the last area we looked at. In this area, we gave this facility a grade of D. The nursing rating analyzes a handful of data points, most of which are associated with quantities of nurse staffing. This facility averaged just 3.2 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is not a very impressive figure. On top of receiving below average marks for nursing hours, this nursing home was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and found that this place was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in this metric.