Fairhaven

This nursing home received a strong overall score as described above, but we especially wanted to note its excellent short-term care grade. We awarded them an A in this category. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to grade a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.6 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This nursing home also excelled in inspections. We awarded it an A- for that area, which is one of our highest grades. This is one of the few facilities with an overall grade in this range which earned multiple category grades this high. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This nursing home was hit with 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to create an immediate risk to resident health or safety. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing score. In fact, we awarded it an above average grade of B+ in this area. Nursing ratings are heavily correlated with quality and quantity of nursing care. This nursing home provides 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics 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 place Maryland in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning residents even once per day.

The next category we graded was long-term care, in which this nursing home received a C. Although this wound up being its weakest category score, this is still not a bad grade. For patients seeking a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. On top of considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility vaccinated 96.62162 percent of its patients, which is a very respectable figure. Finally, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.