Alden of Waterford

To go along with its favorable overall score, we gave this facility an A for the area of inspections. Inspection grades are based on several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this area typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

An additional strong feature for this nursing home is that it was given an impressive short-term care score. Indeed, this proved to be its second best category score. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B+. Our short-term care grade is often used to measure a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to provide highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 5.1 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B+. Our nursing rating weighs several datapoints, however, the primary one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Switching gears to the last area, we gave this facility a grade of D for the area of long-term care. This is the nursing home's least impressive category score. Sadly, this grade hurt the facility's overall grade to a certain degree. Nursing homes that don't fare well in long-term care typically are not as well-staffed and are lagging in a few of the areas of routine personal care we assessed. One of the factors we considered on top of nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. Frankly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to only 79.39394 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.05 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. This was its best feature in this category.