Encore at Turf Valley

Encore at Turf Valley is one of a mere three available nursing homes located in Ellicott City, Maryland. This facility appears to be ranked among the higher-rated facilities we assessed. A score of this caliber requires first-rate marks across the board. Not surprisingly, this is actually the top nursing home in the city. If you look further down this page, you will see this facility's category ratings, which are also quite good.

On top of faring well overall, this nursing home received a nearly flawless inspection report. Consequently, it received one of our best scores in that area with an A+. Inspection ratings are based on pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this area have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

On the list of its many high-end grades, this nursing home was given a strong short-term care score. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. Our short-term care scores are important for prospective residents requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates additional skilled nursing services. This includes a wide scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. This nursing home boosted its score in this category by offering more physical therapy hours to its residents than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who ultimately returned home from this facility. On top of excelling in the area of physical therapy, we found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in the nation in this area with 64.3 percent of its patients returning home.

This nursing home was awarded an impressive long-term care score as well. We awarded it one of our higher scores in that area with a grade of B+. Facilities that receive this type of grade in this category tend to provide consistent around the clock care to make sure residents are kept in good health. This facility's vaccination data weren't as impressive as its nursing hours data. It administered the pneumonia vaccine to just 89.84772 percent of its patients. We'd love to see some improvement herein this statistic in the future. Fortunately, this nursing home keeps its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 1.28 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a substantially lower hospitalization rate than the average nursing home.

The next category we assessed was nursing, where this nursing home was awarded a B. Believe it or not, this proved to be this facility's least impressive area. A facility is doing something right when it's weakest score still beats out most facilities. Our nursing grade consists of a handful of subcategories, but the main one is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provides high levels of nursing care, with an average of 4 hours per resident daily. This is more nursing care than most nursing homes provide. Finally, we also looked at nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing ratings. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these data points as reliable measures of the quality of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.