Elkton Transitional Care Center

On top of receiving a poor overall grade, we also gave this place weak grades across the board in the various categories. In fact, it received just a D for its short-term care grade, which was its highest category. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to gauge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to offer high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. With its score in this area, we were not stunned to find that this place was well below average in terms of the quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its patients based on the data we looked at. Frankly, this was about what we expected to find. The final measure we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.9 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics was damning for this nursing home's short-term care grade.

Unfortunately, this facility's second best category was inspections. Nevertheless, with a grade of just D in this category, it still performed relatively poorly. Our inspection ratings weigh a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. You should be especially cautious when considering a nursing home that has severe deficiencies on a recent inspection report. This particular facility was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only positive thing we found is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they caused a threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility also received 13 substantiated complaints in recent years. This is yet another bad sign.

We also wanted to draw your attention to this facility's poor nursing grade where it received an F. There are several datapoints within this area. Most of these datapoints relate to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place fared well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these datapoints to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.

The next area we looked at is long-term care. It received a lowly F for this category, which is an abysmal grade. Nursing homes that receive this type of score in this category may not provide the kind of consistent 24/7 care that some other facilities provide. After we finished looking at the amount of nursing care, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. We were a bit worried that this nursing home vaccinated a relatively low 83.26848 percent of its patients for pneumonia. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.