Altercare Hartville

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be relatively minor. While this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it was given a very impressive long-term care grade. In fact, long-term care ended up being its second most favorable category score. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A-. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care typically provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is significantly higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. We analyzed the levels of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours the nurses spent with patients, in calculating our score in this area. This nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a relatively low total compared to most nursing homes. Lastly, nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this nursing home performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally a reliable indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

The next category we scored is short-term care. We gave it a grade of C in that area. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this area. In determining these short-term care scores, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to devise a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.