Crowne Health Care of Montgomery

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively minor. This place was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home truly excelled in the category of long-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed more favorably in this area. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 91.36029 percent of its residents. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of C. This wasn't quite as good as some of its other scores, but a grade in this range is not the end of the world. When determining our nursing ratings, we factor in both nursing hours and the training levels of the nurses. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this facility actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally a reliable indicator that a place has quality controls in place.

The final area we looked at is short-term care, which proved to be this facility's weakest area. We gave this facility a D in that area. Of course, this category pulled down the facility's overall grade to a certain degree. Short-term care grades are often used to measure a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To have quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. It looks like this facility was subpar in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the metrics we looked at. Finally, we assessed the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 3.9 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit off the national average.