Walnut Grove Living Center

Walnut Grove Living Center is located in Mcalester, Oklahoma, a city with a population of 29,073 people. This nursing home is a middle of the road facility, with an overall grade of C. This grade is right in line with the city grade in Mcalester, which admittedly is admittedly a little below average nationally. This nursing home did not fare well in all of our categories, but it did not receive any terrible grades either. More information about these categories can be found below.

This nursing home received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A- in this category. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple of minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This facility's long-term care rating ended up being one of its higher scores. The nursing home was awarded a B- in this area. Our long-term care grades are critical for patients requiring personal care. After looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. We were pleased to learn that this nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Finally, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 1.61 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes.

This nursing home's nursing grade appears to be one of its better features. The facility received a grade of C in this category. There are a variety of criteria within this category. Most of the datapoints relate to levels of nurse staffing. This facility averages just 3.2 hours of nursing care per resident daily, which is well below average. Lastly, we also looked at several nursing quality measures. While this nursing home got dinged a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of these quality-based metrics. With fewer than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this statistic. This is often an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving residents at least once a day.

The final area we graded was short-term care, which turned out to be a low point for this nursing home. We awarded this facility a grade of D for our short-term care category. In determining our short-term care scores, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to devise a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. With its poor score in this area, we were not stunned to discover that this place provides far fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most nursing homes. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that just 48.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.