Altercare Zanesville

With an address in Zanesville, Ohio, Altercare Zanesville is one of seven nursing homes in the area. This facility received a bottom of the barrel overall rating based on the data we looked at. This facility didn't have much going for it. Finally, we were surprised to learn that this place received a decent score in the area of long-term care. You can find additional information on this category below.

Although we gave this facility a terrible overall grade, we awarded it a B- for our inspections rating. In fact, the facility received very impressive inspection report this year. Inspection scores account for several factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we rely on is the number and severity of deficiencies. While this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means 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. Lastly, this nursing home was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. This is generally a really bad sign. We would never recommend this facility.

Moving on to the area of short-term care, this nursing home received just a D in this area. As it turns out, this wound up being its second best grade. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to judge a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to offer highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. As you might expect, we found that this facility provides significantly less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than a typical nursing home. The final metric we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 48.9 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

The third category we graded was long-term care. This nursing home's was given an unfortunate long-term care score where it received an F. Facilities that don't fare well in this category typically aren't as well-staffed and are lagging in a few of the areas of routine medical care we looked at. On top of considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 93.25397 percent of its patients, which is a few points below what we anticipated. We were also disappointed with its hospitalization rate. We found that this place had 3 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is nearly twice the national average.

The next area we graded is nursing. This nursing home was given an abysmal grade of F in that area. In determining our nursing grades, we factor in both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of the nurses. With a meager 3.1 hours of nursing care per patient each day, this facility's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below the national average. On top of ranking below average in nursing hours per resident, this place also had poor marks in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in both of these metrics. This is a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are preventable with better nursing care. These metrics helped pull down this nursing home's nursing rating quite a bit.