Autumn Lake Healthcare at Chestertown

Autumn Lake Healthcare at Chestertown is an average-sized facility located in Chestertown, Maryland. This facility is a subpar nursing home. A score of this caliber indicates we found a few red flags. As far as we can see, we would be very reluctant to recommend this facility. If you aren't deterred by this nursing home's report card, feel free to continue reading to learn more about its category grades. Inspection grades are discussed in the next paragraph.

Although we did not rate this nursing home highly overall, we want to draw your attention to its nearly flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A in this category. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. It is typically in your best interest to avoid nursing homes that have a long list of deficiencies. This facility received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to create an imminent threat to resident health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home's second most favorable category is short-term care. We gave it a C in this area. This is basically a middle of the pack grade in this area. Our short-term care ratings are likely more important for those in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not just nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides a greater volume of physical therapist hours to its residents than the average nursing home. The last measure we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that just 44.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.

We were surprised to find that this facility also excelled in nursing. We gave it an impressive grade of D for that category, which is one of our highest scores. There are many subcategories within this category. Most of the factors reflect levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 3.1 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. On top of receiving below average scores for nursing hours, this place was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and found that this facility was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in this metric.

The last category we analyzed is long-term care. This nursing home was given an abysmal grade of F in that area. In a long-term care environment, the primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. We were optimistic to learn that this nursing home vaccinated 98.744774 percent of its residents against pneumonia. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 1.08 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.