East Ohio Regional Hospital Long Term Care

East Ohio Regional Hospital Long Term Care is a small hospital-based facility located in Martins Ferry, Ohio. This is a fine nursing home. We awarded it an overall grade of B, which is a favorable rating. As far as we can see, this place looks like a solid choice for quite a few people. This nursing home's impressive report card was highlighted by its short-term care rating, which is addressed in the next paragraph.

In addition to being a quality facility overall, this nursing home excelled in our short-term care category, where it received an impressive grade of A. Few facilities fared better in this area. Our short-term care ratings are thought to be more important for patients needing rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally mandates additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Unfortunately, it does not look like this facility provided registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of patients who ultimately returned home from the facility. This ended up being more of a strength for this facility. This place performed as well as just about any nursing home in Ohio with 61.9 percent of its patients returning home.

Adding to its impressive category grades, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple relatively minor dings are not the end of the world.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B+. When calculating a facility's nursing score, we consider the number of hours nurses are caring for patients as well as the level of skill of the nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

Moving on to the final area, this nursing home really didn't perform well. With a bottom of the barrel grade of F in that area, this is clearly its worst area. For residents seeking a permanent place to live rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.