Austinwoods Nursing Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively minor. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility fared well in our long-term care category. In fact, we gave it a grade of A for that area, which is one of our better scores. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 98.7013 percent of its patients. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home's next most favorable area is short-term care. We gave it a B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the pack score in this area. Our short-term care ratings are critical for residents seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires additional highly-skilled nursing services. This means a vast range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. We were not able to track down information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 5.5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually well below average.

The final area we graded was nursing. In that area, we awarded this facility an acceptable grade of C. This is this facility's worst area. Our nursing rating is primarily based on a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home surprisingly fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. It scored well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.