Autumn Wood Memory Care

One of the main reasons this turned out to be a strong nursing home is that it received a very impressive long-term care grade. In fact, long-term care ended up being its best category. In that area, we gave this facility an impressive grade of A. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. Once we finished looking at the quantity of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 86.4486 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home also excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A for that area, which is one of our best grades. This is one of the few facilities with an overall grade in this range which earned multiple category grades this high. Inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means CMS did not consider 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 an excellent sign.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B. There are several subcategories included in this grade. Most of the subcategories relate to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The next category we rated was short-term care, which ended up being this facility's weakest category. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F for this category, which is certainly a bit of a disappointment. In computing our short-term care grades, we assess a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This category is often a fair measure of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who ultimately returned home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.1 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.