Manorcare Health Services - Bethesda

With an address in Bethesda, Maryland, Manorcare Health Services - Bethesda is one of four available nursing homes in this area. Featuring an overall grade of A-, this facility is among the more impressive nursing homes we assessed. In fact, we ranked this nursing home in the top third of all nursing homes in the nation. The best aspect of this nursing home's strong profile is its nursing grade. Nursing grades are discussed in the next paragraph

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for its nursing grade. Nursing ratings are tied to quality and quantity of nursing care. This particular nursing home provided 3.2 hours of nursing care per resident daily. At least one quarter of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. This is a high percentage of skilled nursing care. In determining our nursing grades, we apply more weight to care provided by more highly trained nurses such as registered nurses. 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 nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our inspections rating. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some are relatively minor. While this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this nursing home was given a first-rate grade of A- in our short-term care area. Short-term care ratings are based on the facility's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a wide spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. This nursing home is the gold standard when it comes to skilled nursing staffing. It supplied roughly 1.5 times as many physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the typical nursing home. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who returned to the community from this facility. This place performed decently in this area, with 46.4 percent of its patients returning home.

Switching gears to the next category, this nursing home received a respectable long-term care grade. Although this isn't nearly as strong as many of its other scores, this is truly not the end of the world. Our long-term care grades are more important for patients requiring more conventional services associated with activities of daily living. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Candidly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this facility vaccinated only 89.25082 percent of its patients. Finally, we looked at its number of hospitalizations. Here we found that this nursing home had 2.27 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Although this figure is somewhat concerning, this statistic may be skewed for some nursing homes due to the medical complexity of residents.