Sharkey-Issaquena Nursing Home

In addition to being a first rate facility overall, this facility also fared well in our long-term care category, where it earned an A+. Few facilities performed better in this category. For prospective patients looking for a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 70.731705 percent of its patients. This is slightly below what we expected but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Adding to its impressive category scores, this nursing home excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed as well in this area. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This place received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to be an imminent risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. Our nursing grade includes a number of datapoints. The most important factor is the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients. This nursing home averages 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a protocol of moving residents more frequently.

The last area we looked at is short-term care, where this nursing home was given a B. Even though this turned out to be its poorest category score, this is nevertheless an impressive grade. With our short-term care score, we endeavor to craft a meaningful gauge for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we analyze a nursing home's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. The final statistic we considered in this area is the percentage of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.