Big Meadows

One of the reasons this ended up being a strong nursing home is that it received a very impressive inspection score. In fact, inspections turned out to be its best category. In that area, we gave it an A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some can be relatively insignificant. This place received 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies an immediate threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

An additional quality feature for this nursing home is that it was awarded a very positive long-term care score. In fact, this wound up being its second best category grade. In this area, we gave this nursing home a grade of B+. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 99.6337 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next most favorable area we gave this facility in any area came in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a C. In computing our short-term care scores, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to devise a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. We weren't able to track down information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. The last datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is actually below average.

Turning to the fourth area, this facility was given a decent nursing grade of C. Our nursing score looks at the facility's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of skill of those nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, although this facility got dinged a bit for nursing hours, it excelled in some of our quality-based measures. With fewer than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it did very well in this subcategory.