Cadia Healthcare - Hagerstown

This nursing home received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its excellent health inspection reports in recent years. We awarded them an A- in this category. Inspection scores are based on pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this area tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Although this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

This facility's next highest category is its long-term care score, where it received a grade of B-. For residents looking for a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this facility administered the vaccine to just 86.66667 percent of its residents. Nevertheless, this facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home's third highest area was short-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a C. Our short-term care grades are likely most meaningful for those in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually requires additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. In this place's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the typical facility. The hope is that this does not adversely impact the quality of care. Finally, we assessed the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from this facility. We found that 5.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually well below the national average.

Switching gears to our next area, this facility really didn't fare very well. With a bottom of the barrel grade of F in nursing, this was its worst category. When calculating a nursing home's nursing rating, we assess the quantity of hours nurses are caring for residents and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home averaged a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. On top of ranking below average in nursing hours per resident, this facility also had poor marks in the quality-based metrics we looked at in determining our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and major falls. This facility was at about 1.5 times the national average in both of these metrics. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many falls and bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These scores pulled down this facility's nursing grade quite a bit.