Tallahatchie General Hospital

We also wanted to point out the fact that this facility earned near flawless government inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Our inspection grades are tied to several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among the reasons we rated this nursing home so favorably is that it was given a dominant long-term care grade. In fact, long-term care is its second highest category score. In that area, we gave this facility a score of A. When facilities receive this kind of score in long-term care it is a good sign for resident care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. After considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 96.47436 percent of its residents against pneumonia. 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 patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The third area we analyzed is short-term care, where this nursing home was given a B- in this area. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services To provide highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

The final category we analyzed is nursing, in which this nursing home received a B-. Although this turned out to be its worst category rating, this is nevertheless not a terrible score. In computing our nursing scores, we analyze both nursing hours and the training levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides only 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a somewhat discouraging figure as it is well below average. Finally, our nursing scores also factor in quality-based measures, such as avoiding major falls. While this facility did not have as many nursing hours as many other facilities we looked at, it was still better than average in the area of preventing falls. This is typically an indicator of how carefully a facility's nursing staff is tending to its residents. Major falls can typically be avoided if more nurses and better safety protocols are in place.