Generations Center of Spencer

To go along with a strong overall score, we awarded this place an A+ for inspections. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. This place was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies to create an imminent threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was dominant in the area of long-term care, where it received a score of A-. Only a select group of nursing homes performed better in this area. Facilities that do well in this category tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 96.82539 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly can be a life or death illness for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing score. In fact, we awarded it an above average grade of B+ in this area. The nursing grade considers a variety of factors. The most heavily weighted one is the number of hours nurses spend with patients. 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 facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The last category we scored was short-term care, where this facility was given a B-. This actually was this nursing home's weakest area. This is still not a major area of concern. In the area of short-term care, we try to assess indicators of a facility's rehabilitation services. We look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate information about this nursing home's registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The final datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.