Greenwood Center

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our short-term care grade. Short-term care grades are often used to measure a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To have quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we considered in this area is the number of residents that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

We also wanted to emphasize this facility's nearly flawless health inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A- in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively insignificant. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are rare in this industry.

This facility really excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. When determining a facility's nursing grade, we consider the number of hours nurses are caring for residents and the levels of training of the nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 facility Rhode Island in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning a resident more often.

The next area we scored was long-term care, in which this nursing home was awarded a B-. This ended up being this nursing home's least impressive area. This is nevertheless not a terrible score. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. Candidly, we were a bit concerned this nursing home vaccinated 81.06509 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which happens to be quite a few points less than what we were hoping for. Nevertheless, this facility keeps its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.