Sistersville Center

While we gave this facility a poor overall score, we gave it a B for our inspections rating. This was the result of the facility receiving a decent government inspection report this year. Inspection grades weigh a host of factors included in a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. You should avoid places with too many severe deficiencies flagged. While this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

We gave this facility a grade of just D for our long-term care score and that actually ended up being its second most favorable category. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in long-term care it is a bad sign for patient care and it may indicate that the place is not as well-staffed with nurses and aids. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. Frankly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this nursing home vaccinated 74.00881 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is significantly below what we were hoping for. Surprisingly, this nursing home actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.

In our next category, we gave this nursing home a rock-bottom F in the category of short-term care. With our short-term care assessment, we seek to create a sound barometer for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we assess the facility's levels of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Based on its score in this area, we weren't stunned to learn that this place is well below average in terms of the number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the figures we assessed. The final statistic we looked at in this area is the number of patients that returned home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4.7 percent of its patients returning home.

The final category we graded was nursing, in which this facility was given an abysmal score in this category as well. Sadly, it received a lowly F in this category, which is obviously a major concern. There are a variety of data points within this category. Many of these data points are tied to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This nursing home offered only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is not a very impressive figure. On top of rating below average in nursing hours per resident, this place also had poor marks in the quality-based metrics we looked at in determining our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility was at about 1.5 times the national average in both of these data points. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. These scores pulled down this facility's nursing rating quite a bit.