Cromwell Center

Although we were not high on this nursing home overall, we awarded it a B- in nursing. This grade is better than the facility's overall score. When computing a nursing home's nursing score, we weigh the amount of time nurses spend with residents and the level of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, we also assessed several nursing quality measures. Although this nursing home got docked a bit for nursing hours, it actually excelled in some of these quality measures. With less than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this area. This is typically a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a policy of turning patients more frequently.

This nursing home received a C for our inspections category. This was certainly better than its other category grades. Inspection grades are based on items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key item to look for on these reports. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to patient safety. This nursing home was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to find that none were in any of the categories labeled G through L. This means that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to be an imminent danger to resident safety or health. Unfortunately, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received significant government fines in recent years.

This nursing home's third best area was its short-term care grade, where it received a C. Our short-term care ratings are probably more meaningful for those requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not just nursing services, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. We were surprised to find that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing areas we assessed. In fact, it offered fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. It is important to determine whether this is adversely impacting the quality of care. The last statistic we assessed in this area is the number of patients that were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 4.5 percent of this facility's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.

Turning to our fourth category, this facility didn't perform very well in this category either. With a poor grade of F in long-term care, this is just about as bad as it gets. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means the facility didn't perform well in our quality measures relating to patient care. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccines. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to just 60 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best score in this category.