Alden Meadow Park

We want to point out that this facility outperformed its overall grade in the category of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best scores in that area with an A. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This place received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This facility's second most favorable category turned out to be its short-term care score, where it received a grade of C. In the area of short-term care, we seek to qualify measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We assess a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Unfortunately, this place was below average in terms of its level of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. The important question is whether this also affected quality of care. The last measure we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that just 4.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.

Another strength of this facility is its favorable grade in nursing. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with an D. Our nursing grade consists of several components, but the main one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is an alarmingly low total. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing scores. This facility fared well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers.

Turning to the fourth category, we gave this nursing home a grade of D in our long-term care category. This was the nursing home's least impressive category grade. For patients in need of a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.