Scott County Nursing Center

On top of being a first rate nursing home overall, this nursing home also fared well in the area of long-term care, where it earned an impressive grade of A+. Few facilities performed better in this area. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In addition, this nursing home also excelled in inspections, where it received a grade of A. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means the government inspectors 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.

This facility received even higher grades in the area of nursing. In fact, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A-. In determining our nursing ratings, we factor in both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The final area we analyzed is short-term care, which proved to be this facility's least impressive area. Unfortunately, we gave it an F in this category, which is clearly somewhat concerning. In the area of short-term care, we strive to evaluate measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The last metric we assessed in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 3.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics sunk this facility's short-term care grade.