Marshwood Center

This facility received a strong overall score as described above, but we especially want to emphasize its excellent inspections in recent years. We gave it an A in this area. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with better grades in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this place had a few deficiencies on its report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B+. Our nursing rating assesses the facility's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place Maine in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a policy of turning a resident more frequently.

This nursing home is also above average in the area of short-term care, where it was given a score of B+. It outperformed most nursing homes in this area. In our short-term care grade, we try to forge a fair measure for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we assess a nursing home's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This nursing home's least impressive category is long-term care, which is the final category we analyzed. In this category, we awarded this facility a grade of D. Nursing homes that do not score well in this category often do not provide as much nursing care and also may be lagging in some of the areas of routine personal care we looked at. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this nursing home provided the vaccine to a relatively low 88.888885 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this place actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.