Slate Belt Health & Rehabilitation Center

We want to draw your attention to the fact that this facility outperformed its overall grade in the area of inspections. In fact, it received an excellent government inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our best scores in that category with an A+. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively minor. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This means that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

As it turns out, this nursing home only received a grade of D for its long-term care grade, which was actually one of its more respectable category scores. Facilities that do not fare well in long-term care often don't provide as much nursing care and also may be struggling in a few of the areas of routine personal care we looked at. One of the datapoints we considered on top of nurse's aid hours is vaccines. Frankly, we were a bit concerned this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccination to only 90.44944 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.

Another strength of this nursing home is its favorable grade in nursing. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with an impressive grade of D. Nursing grades are heavily correlated with quantity of nursing care available. With just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, this facility's nurse staffing levels were significantly below average. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility fared well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these metrics to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.

The next category we looked at was short-term care, is this nursing home's weakest area. We awarded this facility a grade of D in that category. In computing our short-term care ratings, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our goal is to devise a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. With a score this poor in this area, we weren't shocked to learn that this facility was below average in several staffing areas we focus on. In fact, it provided significantly fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most nursing homes. The last metric we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.2 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics doomed this nursing home's short-term care grade.