Sage Bluff Health & Rehab Center

While we gave this place a terrible overall score, we gave it a B for our inspections category. This was due to the nursing home receiving a quality inspection report this year. Inspection scores are tied to datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key thing to look for on these inspections. You should especially avoid nursing homes with severe deficiencies associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

Turning to the category of short-term care, this nursing home was given just a D in that area. Unfortunately, this ended up being one of its better grades. In calculating our short-term care grades, we size up the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This rating is generally a solid measure of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Based on its abysmal rating in this category, we weren't surprised to learn that this nursing home provided significantly fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most facilities. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 4.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

We gave this facility a grade of just D for our nursing rating. Our nursing score looks at the facility's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of skill of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing ratings. This place performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.

Switching gears to our last category, this facility didn't perform well in this area either. With a very poor grade of F in long-term care, this is just about as bad as it gets. When nursing homes receive this type of score in long-term care it is a bad sign for resident care and it may indicate that the facility is not as well-staffed with nurses and aids. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 91.83674 percent of its residents. This is slightly less than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable figure. Surprisingly, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.