Shawneespring Skilled Nursing Facility

This facility earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A in this category. Arguably the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

Additionally, we also would like to point out that this nursing home was given favorable short-term care marks this year. We awarded them one of our more favorable grades in that category, with a B. This turned out to be the facility's second highest score. Short-term care grades are based in part on a facility's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a vast spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the number of residents that eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 5 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

We gave this facility just a D for our long-term care rating. This is not one of our better scores. If you are seeking services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care ratings. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. We were pleased to discover that this facility vaccinated 99.717514 percent of its residents against pneumonia. To our surprise, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

The next area we assessed is nursing, which was this nursing home's weakest area. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in this category. Our nursing category weighs many factors, many of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. To pair with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this place also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average nursing home.