Hagerstown Healthcare Center

Even though we graded this nursing home incredibly poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable short-term care grade this year. We gave it a C in that area, which was the closest thing to a bright spot we could find for this facility. Our short-term care scores are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a broad spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. In this nursing home's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the average facility. The hope is that this does not adversely impact the quality of care. The last metric we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.3 percent of this facility's residents returned home. This figure was below the national average.

We gave this facility just a D for our long-term care grade and that actually turned out to be its next best score. Nursing homes that don't fare well in long-term care typically aren't as well-staffed and are lagging in some of the areas of routine medical care we looked at. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. As it turns out, this nursing home vaccinated only 81.435646 percent of its patients, which is somewhat concerning. To our surprise, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.04 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This was its best score in this category.

This facility's next best category was nursing, but even there it received a grade of just D. This is still a well below average grade. Our nursing grade is primarily based on a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This facility averaged just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This statistic is far below average. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. This facility performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these statistics to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Turning the final category of inspections, this facility really did not fare well. It received an F in our inspection category. This happens to be our most heavily weighted category in our grading system. When a nursing home has this bad of an inspection rating, you should look for severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to patient safety. This particular facility was assessed 9 deficiencies by CMS. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they caused a risk to resident safety or health. Lastly, we also would like to draw your attention to the fact that this facility was assessed large government fines in recent years of over $50,000. This usually signifies that CMS inspectors grew tired after several years of failed inspections.