Franklin Meadows

In addition to being a first rate nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in our inspections category, where it received an A+. Few places fared this well in this category. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home fared well in our long-term care category. Indeed, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which turns out to be one of our highest scores. Facilities that receive this type of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to ensure residents are well cared for. Once we assessed the amount of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 99.00333 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a life threatening ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

The next best category we awarded this nursing home in any category came in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a B-. Our short-term care ratings are probably more important for folks requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing. This means not only nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

The next category we looked at was nursing, in which this facility was given a grade of B-. Although this proved to be its weakest category score, this is still not the end of the world. Nursing scores are based in large part on quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a lower figure than we were hoping for. Finally, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this place actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is often a good indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place.