Maplewood Care Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received a very impressive short-term care score. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of A. In determining our short-term care grades, we assess the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This area is often a fair measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.8 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we gave this nursing home a grade of A. We looked at the skill-level of nurses working for the nursing home, in addition to the quantity of hours the nurses spent with patients, in computing our grade in this category. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This facility also earned excellent government inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our best grades in that category, with an A-. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively minor. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

The next area we scored is this facility's weakest area. Nevertheless, even in its worst category we still awarded it an acceptable grade of C for our long-term care category. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Frankly, we were a bit alarmed this facility administered the vaccine to a relatively low 84.92647 percent of its patients. Nevertheless, this place was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.