Autumn Care of Mechanicsville

On top of receiving a great overall grade, this facility fared even better in our inspections category which is associated with the nursing home's recent inspection reports. In fact, we awarded it an A for this category, which is one of our best scores. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

Another one of this facility's above average category scores came in the area of short-term care. We gave them one of our stronger scores in that area, with a score of B. In computing our short-term care scores, we assess a facility's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This grade is considered to be a meaningful assessment of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last metric we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 5.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

The third category we assessed is long-term care. This facility was given an impressive long-term care score, with a grade of B in this area. For prospective patients looking for a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 91.42857 percent of its patients, which is a bit below what we expected. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The final area we scored is nursing, in which this nursing home received a B-. Although this proved to be its poorest category grade, this is nevertheless not the end of the world. Our nursing grade includes several components, however, the main consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This particular facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This figure is far below average. Finally, our nursing grades also consider some quality-focused measures. We especially like to look at the percentage of residents who experienced pressure ulcers and major falls. These statistics are decent measures of the quality of nursing care, since better care tends to reduce these issues.