Applewood Center

In addition to receiving a strong overall score, this nursing home earned an A+ inspection rating. This score is based on the facility's recent government inspections. An A+ in this area is one of the best complements we can offer a facility. Our inspection grades are based on items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this area have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. We weren't able to find deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its profile, this nursing home also earned a score of B+ for its long-term care rating. This is an above average grade in this area. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in this category it is a good sign for patient care and indicates that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents out of the hospital. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility is also strong in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B+. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. The nursing rating analyzes a handful of components, most of which are associated with nursing hours. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In the last category we graded, this facility received a very favorable grade of B+ in our short-term care category. With this score, the facility wrapped up a very impressive profile. In computing our short-term care grades, we size up the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This score is typically a fair assessment of a facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this category is the number of patients who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.