Autumn Lake Healthcare at Pikesville

This nursing home really excelled in the category of short-term care, with an A- in this area. This really boosted its overall grade. Short-term care ratings are based on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a wide scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final measure we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, nursing turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an A-. Nursing grades are heavily correlated with levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

We awarded this nursing home just a D for our long-term care score. This is not a very good score. For patients seeking a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility gave the vaccine to 99.45206 percent of its residents, which is a very respectable figure. Surprisingly, this place also keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

The last category we looked at was inspections. This facility didn't receive glowing inspections in recent years. We had to give it an F in this category. Since this data is compiled by independent government inspectors, we heavily weight a poor performance in this category. This really dragged down this place's overall score. For places with poor inspection grades, you should really scrutinize any severe deficiencies found on their inspection reports. This facility was assessed 5 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they posed a threat to resident safety or health. Lastly, we want to point out that this place was assessed significant government fines recently of more than $100,000. This often suggests that a nursing home's bad performance spanned several years.