Aristacare at Meadow Springs

With an address in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, Aristacare at Meadow Springs is one of a mere two nursing homes in the city. This nursing home was awarded an overall grade of D, which is a well below average grade. Based on our assessment, we'd struggle to recommend this nursing home. Despite all this, one of the few highlights of this nursing home's profile is its impressive inspection reports. You can continue reading to learn more about inspections and other category grades

While we were fairly low on this nursing home overall, we awarded it an A for our inspections rating. This score is significantly more impressive than the nursing home's overall score. Our inspection grades account for several factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. You should avoid places with a list of severe deficiencies flagged. While this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

We also gave this nursing home a decent score in the area of long-term care, with a B-. For patients in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are very important. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. We were pleased to find that this facility vaccinated 99.806206 percent of its residents against pneumonia. The last datapoint we assessed was the facility's hospitalization rate. Here we found that this nursing home had 3.74 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Although this figure is somewhat concerning, this number can be skewed for some nursing homes based on the medical complexity of patients.

This facility's next best category was nursing, but even there it received a grade of just D. This is still a well below average grade. When computing our nursing ratings, we assess both staffing levels and the levels of licensure of those nurses. According to CMS records, this place averaged 5.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This was actually above the national average. Keep in mind, however, that when we compute our nursing scores, we apply more weight to hours performed by nurses with a higher level of skill. Despite being above average in terms of nursing hours, this place had abysmal scores in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. For starters, we looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers. This place was at more than double the national average in this statistic. This is quite alarming when you consider that many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the nursing home's fate of receiving a very poor nursing grade.

The final area we rated was short-term care. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this category, which is a very poor grade. In determining our short-term care grades, we assess the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This rating is more often than not a fair measure of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 19.3 percent of this facility's patients returned home.