Charlestown Community

Charlestown Community is a very-large non-profit facility in Catonsville, Maryland. This is a very good nursing home. We gave this it an overall grade of B+, which is very favorable grade. This proved to be one of the three best nursing homes in Catonsville. The best part of this place's profile is is its short-term care rating. short-term care grades are discussed in the next section.

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our short-term care grade. In crafting our short-term care scores, we assess the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to create a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, we found that this nursing home provided respectable levels of physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident. The last measure we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it fared as well as just about any nursing home in Maryland in this area with 71.8 percent of its residents returning home. Unfortunately, at most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

This facility also performed well in inspections, which is based on the facility's recent inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A- for that area, which is one of our highest grades. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with higher scores in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This place was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This indicates that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B. Nursing grades are tied to quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home provides 3.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The next area we scored was long-term care. We gave this facility one of our higher scores in that area, with a B. This facility ended up being relatively strong across the board. If you are looking for anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care grades. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 89.375 percent of its patients. This is a bit below what we anticipated. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.