The Waters of Clinton

This nursing home received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its excellent health inspection reports in recent years. We gave them an A in this category. Our inspection scores weigh a host of factors included in a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this category generally have few severe deficiencies. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

In addition, we also wanted to note that this facility was given positive short-term care marks in this assessment. We awarded them one of our more impressive grades in that category, with a B. This proved to be the nursing home's second strongest grade. In the area of short-term care, we endeavor to evaluate indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We analyze a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Sadly, this nursing home's next highest category was long-term care. As it turns out, with a D in this category, it still performed somewhat poorly. If you are looking for anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care ratings. After considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 94.719475 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is better than the average nursing home. Surprisingly, this facility also keeps its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

The final category we scored was nursing, which ended up being a weak link for this nursing home. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in our nursing category. When determining a facility's nursing score, we look at the amount of time nurses commit to residents and the level of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home averaged only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. To pair with its below average totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this nursing home had poor scores in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. For starters, we looked at the percent of residents having falls leading to major injury. This place was at more than 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is concerning in light of the fact that so many falls could likely be prevented with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the nursing home's fate of receiving a poor nursing rating.