Autumn Lake Healthcare at Chesapeake Woods

On top of being a strong nursing home overall, this facility excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A-. Few facilities performed better in this area. Inspection grades are based on items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this area tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This facility was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to create an immediate risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another one of this nursing home's impressive category scores came in the area of short-term care. We awarded them one of our stronger scores in that category, with a score of B+. In the area of short-term care, we seek to evaluate indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we considered in this area is the percentage of patients that returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.9 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This nursing home also received a strong long-term care score. In fact, we awarded it an above average grade of B+ in this category. For prospective residents looking for a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 90.81633 percent of its patients, which is somewhat below what we were hoping for. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, we were pleased to find facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The final area we looked at is nursing, where we gave it a favorable grade of B. This facility really didn't have any weak categories. The nursing grade is based on several data points. The most heavily weighted one is the amount of time nurses spend with patients. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some quality-based measures in this category. This facility fared well in some of the quality measures we assessed. For example, in terms of the number of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, this place performed better than the national average. This is generally an indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented with better nursing care.