Rural Health Care Center

Neither this place's overall grade nor its category grades gave us much to write home about. Its best category was long-term care, but even there we gave it a grade of just D. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Candidly, we were a bit worried that this nursing home provided the vaccine to just 26.506023 percent of its residents. Surprisingly, this nursing home actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had just 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.

This facility didn't receive favorable government inspection reports in recent years. In fact, it received a grade of just D for its inspection grade, which was unfortunately its second best category. One of the most significant factors in assessing an inspection report is deficiencies. We would pay close attention to the level of severity of the deficiencies. This facility was assessed 9 deficiencies by CMS. The only positive thing we found is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that suggest they caused a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We would not recommend this facility under any circumstance.

We were stunned to find that this facility also excelled in the area of nursing. We awarded it an D for that category, which is one of our highest grades. Nursing grades are largely based on a facility's nurse staffing. This place offered only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is well below average. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. This nursing home fared well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these metrics to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The last category we rated is short-term care, which turned out to be a low point for this facility. We gave this nursing home a grade of D in the area of short-term care. Short-term care grades are commonly used to measure a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Considering its score in this category, we weren't surprised to learn that this facility was well below average in terms of the quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the figures we looked at. Honestly, this was what we expected to find. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who eventually returned home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.