Slaton Care Center

In addition to being a quality nursing home overall, this nursing home really excelled in the area of long-term care, where it received an impressive grade of A. Few nursing homes did better in this category. When nursing homes receive this type of score in this category it is a good sign for resident care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility also performed well in inspections. In fact, it earned a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. It received one of our best scores in that area with an A-. Few facilities with an overall score in this range performed this well in multiple categories. Arguably the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This facility was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but a grade in this range is not the end of the world. Our nursing score is based on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of training of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place surprisingly fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In fact, it scored well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

The next area we assessed was short-term care, which is this facility's least impressive category. We gave this facility a D in this category. Of course, this category hurt the nursing home's overall profile to some degree. Our short-term care ratings are thought to be most meaningful for individuals in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually utilizes more skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This was not a strength for this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, about half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.