Catonsville Commons

While we gave this nursing home a terrible overall grade, we gave it a C for our nursing rating. The nursing grade weighs quite a few factors, most of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This place averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, which is a very low figure. Lastly, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based measures, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this place performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally a reliable indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a facility supplies enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

Sadly, this nursing home's next best score is short-term care. Nevertheless, with a D in this category, it still performed relatively poorly. In computing these short-term care grades, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to create a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. With its score in this area, we weren't stunned to discover that this facility is well below average in terms of the number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the measures we looked at. Frankly, this was about what we expected here. Finally, we assessed the percentage of residents who who were able to eventually return home from this facility. This facility didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.

Unfortunately, this facility's third highest score is long-term care. As it turns out, with a D in this area, it still fared relatively badly. For patients in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 97.53425 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this place also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

Looking to our last category of inspections, we gave this facility a grade of just just D, which is a relatively poor grade. Our inspection score is based on the nursing home's government inspection reports. Since this information is collected by independent government inspectors, we place significant weight on it in our overall grades. One of the most critical factors in assessing inspection reports is deficiencies. We recommend you scrutinize the severity of the deficiencies. This facility was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they created a risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility also received 3 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is yet another bad sign.