Aperion Care Litchfield

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this place really excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. Inspection ratings are based on many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this category have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

Another one of this facility's better category grades came in the area of long-term care. In that category, we awarded this facility a B+. It actually fared better than most nursing homes in this area. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia sadly is often a deadly ailment for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Another issue is the F this facility was given in the area of short-term care. Our short-term care grades are based in part on a facility's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a broad range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, in addition to other variations of therapy. Given its poor rating in this area, we weren't shocked to learn this place provides substantially fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most nursing homes. The last measure we assessed in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics doomed this facility's short-term care score.

The final category we looked at was nursing. It received an F for this area, which is a very poor score. This is clearly a major concern. The nursing score features numerous subcategories. The most important factor is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This facility provided just 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing scores. This place performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.