Garrett County Subacute Unit

With an address in Oakland, Maryland, Garrett County Subacute Unit is one of a mere three available nursing homes in the city. This proved to be an A+ facility. Receiving an A+ in our rating scheme requires first-rate marks across the board. In addition, this facility is also based in a hospital, which often means the nursing home offers a wider array of healthcare services. This also proved to be a very consistent facility with consistent grades in all four of the major categories we assessed. Additional information about its category grades can be found below.

In addition to receiving a great overall score, this facility received an A+ in the category of short-term care. In computing our short-term care grades, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The purpose is to devise a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. This nursing home is substantially above the national average in terms of its quantity of both physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents. In fact, it provided about 50% more care per resident from both of these care providers than the average facility provided. These are generally good indicators of quality short-term care. The last datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that it fared as well as just about any nursing home in Maryland in this area with 66.3 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, at most facilities, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

This nursing home also received a virtually flawless government inspection. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with an A+. This is one of the few facilities to receive multiple A+ category grades. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. It does not appear that we have information on deficiency's for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In the next category we assessed, this facility received superb marks in the area of long-term care. For this reason, it received one of our best grades in that area with a grade of of A+. For prospective residents in need of a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down information about this nursing home's vaccination rates. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Turning to the last area, this facility also performed well in our nursing category. We awarded it an A for that category. This rounded out a straight A report card. The nursing category includes a handful of factors, many of which are based on nursing hours. This facility provides an incredible 8.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Out of this total, many of the hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly highly trained levels of nurses. On top of providing impressive levels of care, this facility also excelled in the quality-based metrics we assessed. It performed as well as any facility in the state in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.