Aristacare at Meadow Springs

We want to point out that this nursing home really outperformed its overall score in the category of inspections. In fact, it received an excellent inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best grades in that area with a grade of A. Inspection scores are based on pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

In addition, we also wanted to point out that this nursing home received favorable long-term care marks this year. We awarded them one of our higher scores in this area, with a B+. This turned out to be the facility's second strongest grade. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. After considering the volume of nursing care, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 95.98393 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is too frequently a life threatening health condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility also earned a strong nursing score. We awarded it a F in this area. There are numerous subcategories within this category. Many of these datapoints are tied to nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing grades. This nursing home fared well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

This facility's least impressive area was short-term care, which is the last area we scored. Sadly, it received an abysmal F in this category. Even with a few solid scores in other areas, this grade is still disappointing so we felt obligated to draw your attention to it. Our short-term care grade is typically used to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To provide highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to have better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. With a grade of this caliber for this area, we were not stunned to discover this nursing home was well below average in multiple staffing areas we focus on. In fact, it offered far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most facilities. The final statistic we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 2.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics doomed this nursing home's short-term care score.