Altercare Thornville

We wanted to point out that this facility's short-term care score outperformed its overall grade. We gave it a B for short-term care. In crafting these short-term care ratings, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to formulate a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that 5.5 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Surprisingly, this facility actually received a good grade in inspections as well. In fact, we gave it a B- for that category, which is one of our better grades. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection scores. One of those factors is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some can be quite insignificant. This place was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This indicates that the government inspectors did not deem any of these deficiencies to create an immediate threat to patient safety or health. A couple of minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home in any area came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of C. Our nursing rating analyzes the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of skill of those nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This figure is significantly below average. Finally, despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this facility performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is often a good indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place.

This nursing home's least impressive area is long-term care, which is the last area we analyzed. For this area, we gave this nursing home a grade of just D. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. We were optimistic to learn that this facility vaccinated 96.323524 percent of its patients against pneumonia. To our surprise, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.