Applewood Living Center

This nursing home earned a strong overall grade as described above, but we especially wanted to point out its excellent nursing score. We awarded them an A- in this category. Nursing ratings are tied to quantity of nursing care available. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Turning to another one of this facility's strengths, it also earned a very impressive inspection grade. In fact, inspections turned out to be one of its best category grades. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an A-. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively minor. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. A couple relatively minor dings are not necessarily something to panic about.

This facility also was given a favorable short-term care grade. Indeed, we gave it an above average score of B+ in this category. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services In order to offer quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who ultimately returned home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

The final area we scored is long-term care. This nursing home was given an impressive long-term care score in our assessment, with a B. This facility truly did not have any weak grades. 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 patients. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 33.71212 percent of its patients. This is slightly less than we expected. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.