Baldwin Care Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection grades are tied to pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this area typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also awarded this facility a score of A+ for its long-term care grade. Facilities that do well in this category tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 99.02913 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly can be a life threatening condition for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. In computing our nursing grades, we look at both nursing hours and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving residents even once per day.

In the last category we rated, this nursing home was given a very favorable grade of A- in our short-term care category. With this score, the nursing home finished off a straight A profile. In our short-term care grade, we endeavor to create a meaningful barometer for rehabilitation. In this process, we assess the nursing home's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we considered in this area is the number of patients that were able to return home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.