Longmeadow Care Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was not a highlight, it actually excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A- for that area, which is one of our highest scores. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite minor. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. In that area, we awarded this facility an B-. When determining a nursing home's nursing rating, we assess the number of hours nurses are seeing residents and the level of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility surprisingly excelled in some of the quality measures we looked at. It performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the number of hours of care provided.

Tragically, we gave this facility an F for its long-term care score. Nursing homes that receive this kind of score in long-term care likely don't provide the type of consistent around the clock care that some other nursing homes offer. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 72.268906 percent of its residents. This is multiple points below the national average. To our surprise, this place actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.

The next category we looked at is short-term care. Unfortunately, we gave it an F for this area, which is a rock bottom grade. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To have good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Considering its score in this area, we weren't surprised to learn that this nursing home was well below average in terms of the number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the figures we looked at. Frankly, this was about what we expected to find. The last metric we assessed in this category is the number of patients who returned home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4 percent of its patients returning home.