Elkhart Meadows

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with better scores in this category typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Contributing to its profile, this facility also earned a score of B+ for its long-term care rating. This is a well above average score in this category. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a great way to avoid negative health outcomes for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility is also strong in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B+. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. The nursing rating is based on several components, however, the primary one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning a resident more frequently.

Moving on to our last area, this facility was given a decent short-term care rating. Even though this was not nearly as good as some of its other scores, this is truly a middle of the pack score. In computing our short-term care grades, we scrutinize the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This score is more often than not a meaningful measure of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Unfortunately, it does not look like this nursing home submitted registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The last measure we considered in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is below average.