The Middletown Home

To pair with its relatively modest overall score, we awarded this nursing home an A for our inspections rating. This grade is far more impressive than the facility's overall rating. Inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

Building on this nursing home's list of strengths, it also earned an excellent nursing grade. We gave them an impressive grade of B- in this area. Our nursing rating analyzes the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This place provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared with most other nursing homes. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility surprisingly excelled in some of the quality measures we looked at. In fact, it performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the number of hours of care provided.

Turning to the area of long-term care, this facility received a grade of just D in that area. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means the facility did not perform well in our quality measures relating to resident care. After we finished looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. Frankly, we were a bit alarmed this facility vaccinated only 73.27328 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Surprisingly, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This is its best score in this category.

The next category we analyzed is short-term care, which is a weak spot for this facility. We awarded this facility a grade of D for our short-term care category. In determining these short-term care grades, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to devise a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. As you might expect, we discovered that this facility provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the typical nursing home. The last datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 3.5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics sunk this facility's short-term care score.