Epsom Healthcare Center

In addition to performing well overall, this nursing home also earned a nearly flawless inspection report. Therefore, it received one of our highest grades in that area with an A+. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In addition, this facility received superb marks in the area of long-term care. For this reason, it received one of our most impressive scores in that category with a grade of A+. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. In addition to considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia tragically can be a dangerous ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't take any chances. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B+ for its nursing rating. This is a well above average score in this category. Nursing scores are based in large part on nurse staffing levels. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The last area we rated was short-term care. This nursing home was awarded a favorable short-term care score this year, with a B-. Even though this isn't nearly as good as some of its other category grades, this is nevertheless an acceptable score for this category. In determining our short-term care grades, we size up a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is considered to be a fair measure of the facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.2 percent of this facility's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.