The D Scott Hudgens Center for Skilled Nursing

This facility received a strong overall grade as mentioned above, but we especially wanted to point out its excellent long-term care grade. We gave them an A in this category. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 85.2459 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which happens to be a few points lower than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable figure. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home performed well in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Nursing grades are primarily based on the facility's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In addition, this facility also earned first-rate inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. Inspection scores account for a host of factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher grades in this area generally have very few of these severe deficiencies. This facility was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The next area we assessed was short-term care, in which this nursing home was given a B. This facility did not turn out to have any real weaknesses. Our short-term care scores are arguably more meaningful for individuals needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally mandates additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.