The Bell Minor Home

Although we didn't grade this facility favorably overall, we did give it an excellent score in the category of inspections, where it earned an A+. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This tells you CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

This nursing home's short-term care score turns out to be one of its better grades. The facility received a grade of C in this area. Our short-term care scores are presumably most important for people needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not just nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 4.4 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

We gave this facility just a D for our long-term care grade. This is not an impressive grade. For prospective patients seeking a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are an important measure. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is a very respectable figure. To our surprise, this place also keeps its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

Turning to our fourth area, this nursing home didn't perform very well here either. With a very poor grade of F in nursing, this is about as bad as it gets. In determining a facility's nursing rating, we consider the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients and the levels of training of the nurses. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. In addition to rating below average in nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also had poor marks in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in both of these metrics. This is a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These scores pulled down this nursing home's nursing grade quite a bit.