M M Ewing Continuing Care Center

One of the reasons this place turned out to be a great nursing home is it received an A+ in our inspections category. This is as good as it gets in this category. Inspection grades are tied to pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area typically have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A-. Our nursing score assesses a handful of subcategories, however, the primary consideration is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home averages 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 nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility also was strong in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a grade of A-. Few nursing homes received a better grade in this area. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and offer extensive hands on care to residents. One of the datapoints we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 98.04878 percent of its patients. This is a reliable method to avoid unnecessary deaths for the elderly population. Clearly, this place 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 figure.

The last category we rated is short-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a grade of B+. This rounded out a very favorable report card. Few nursing homes earned a B+ or higher in all four categories. In computing our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize the facility's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This score is considered to be a fair assessment of a facility's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 5 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.