Care Center of Aberdeen

This facility received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its excellent health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A in this category. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors didn't 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.

This facility also performed favorably in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a score of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. When nursing homes receive this type of grade in long-term care it is a good sign for patient care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses aids. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccines. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 99.6997 percent of its patients. This is a proven method to minimize unnecessary deaths for the senior population. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of C in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. Nursing scores are heavily correlated with nurse staffing levels. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily, which is not an impressive total. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In fact, it performed well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the quantity of hours of care offered.

Switching gears to our final category, this facility did not perform well. With a poor grade of F in short-term care, this is this facility's poorest area. In determining our short-term care grades, we size up a facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is often a solid measure of the facility's rehabilitation. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents that who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.2 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.