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 96.58635 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's second least favorable score is short-term care, where it received a grade of just D in that area. This is a well below average grade. In the category of short-term care, we strive to evaluate measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Considering its grade in this area, we were not stunned to find that this facility is well below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the data we looked at. Frankly, this was what we expected to find. The final metric we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 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.

This facility's weakest area was nursing, which is the final category we scored. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this category. Despite some decent grades in other areas, this score is still disappointing so we felt obligated to draw your attention to it. The nursing rating includes many factors, many of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This place offered only 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. 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 grades. This place fared well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these data points to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.