Smithville Western Care Center

We want to point out that this nursing home outperformed its overall score in the category of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our best grades in that area with an A. Our inspection grades account for several factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with better scores in this area generally have very few severe deficiencies. This particular nursing home received 8 deficiencies on its inspection report. Overall, this is still a good inspection report, but we'd always recommend looking into any deficiencies you find troubling.

Additionally, we gave this facility a grade of B in our long-term care category. This is one of our more favorable scores. Facilities that excel in this category tend to provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. On top of considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 96.07843 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia tragically can be a life or death condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of C. When determining a nursing home's nursing rating, we assess the amount of time nurses are caring for patients as well as the level of licensure of the nurses. This place provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a somewhat concerning figure which is well below average. Lastly, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics. While this nursing home got docked a bit for its nursing hours, it excelled in some of these quality measures. With fewer than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared very well in this subcategory. This can be an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving residents even once per day.

The last area we looked at was short-term care, which proved to be this facility's weakest category. We awarded this nursing home a D in this area. Unfortunately, this category pulled down the nursing home's overall grade to some degree. Our short-term care ratings are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a vast range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The final statistic we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics sunk this nursing home's short-term care score.