Generations Center of Spencer

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so favorably is that it received a dominant long-term care grade. In fact, long-term care turned out to be its second highest category score. In that area, we awarded this facility a score of A-. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the statistics we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 93.86973 percent of its patients. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B+. Nursing scores are based largely on nurse staffing levels. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of turning a patient more frequently.

The next category we assessed was short-term care. In this area, we gave this nursing home an acceptable grade of B-. This was this nursing home's weakest category. In forming these short-term care ratings, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to formulate a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was well below average.