Tippah County Nursing Home

Tippah County Nursing Home is a small hospital-based facility located in Ripley, Mississippi. We think highly of this nursing home, which we gave a B+ overall. We were equally impressed with the city grade of nursing homes in Ripley, making this one of the best places to find a nursing home. You can definitely do much worse than this nursing home. This facility's impressive profile was highlighted by its inspection reports, which we will address in the next section.

On top of being a first rate facility overall, this nursing home also performed well in our inspections category, where it received an A+. Few places fared this well in this area. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was given an A+ for its long-term care grade. Long-term care ratings in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the datapoints we considered after nursing hours is vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a reliable method to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the senior population. The last statistic we assessed was its hospitalization rate. We found that this place had 2.58 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of B-. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. Our nursing grade analyzes the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the number of hours spent with residents. According to CMS records, this place averaged 3.9 hours of nursing care per patient per day. Keep in mind that when we compute our nursing grades, we apply more weight to hours performed by nurses with a higher level of skill. Lastly, we also considered some quality-based assessments. This place performed well in some of the quality measures we assessed. In terms of the number of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, this facility beat the national average.

The final area we assessed was short-term care. Sadly, it received a lowly F in this area, which is a rock bottom grade. You should not simply dismiss a nursing home because of a single terrible category though. In determining our short-term care scores, we analyze a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This rating is often a useful measure of a facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. It looks like this place was subpar in the two key staffing areas we looked at. The facility offered fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 15.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.