Ruleme Center

The primary reason this nursing home received a decent overall grade is its impeccable health inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our higher grades in that category, with an A. This is a notably better score than the place's overall grade, which was decent but certainly not elite. Inspection scores account for several factors included in a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this area generally have very few severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

One of this nursing home's better category scores was in the category of long-term care. This ended up being its second most favorable category. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. In the area of long-term care, we look at the quantity of care offered by a facility, as opposed to more sophisticated services. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. Thankfully, this facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its residents. Lastly, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home in any area came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. Our nursing rating assesses the facility's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the amount of time spent with patients. This place provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, although this place got docked a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in a few of our quality measures. With fewer than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it did well in this subcategory.

The last category we graded is short-term care, is this facility's worst category. We gave this facility a grade of D in that category. This is one of just a couple of weak points of an otherwise strong profile. Short-term care grades are often used to judge a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to provide high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely was not a strength for this facility. We found that just 4.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.