Marshwood Center

This nursing home earned a strong overall grade as discussed above, but we especially wanted to emphasize its excellent nursing rating. We awarded them a grade of A in this category. Our nursing grade is primarily based on a facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides an incredible 4.1 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is much more care than what is offered by most places. Lastly, this place also excelled in the quality measures we assessed. For example, it fared as well as any nursing home Maine when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as good indicators of the quality of nursing care being provided.

This facility received impressive grades in the area of short-term care as well. Consequently, we awarded it one of our most dominant grades in that area with a score of A-. Short-term care grades are vital for prospective residents requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a broad spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. This facility provides more services with physical therapists and registered nurses than most facilities we looked at. Finally, we looked at the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes with 57.1 percent of its residents returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most facilities.

This nursing home also performed at a high level in the category of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, it earned one of our best grades in that category with a grade of B+. Inspection grades are based on many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this area tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G through L. This means the inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

Moving on to the final area, this facility didn't fare well. Due to an abysmal grade of F in this area, this is clearly this nursing home's worst area. If you are looking for services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care grades. Based on its grade in this category, we were surprised to learn that this facility received good marks in both nursing hours and its vaccination records. Indeed, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 95.69536 percent of its patients. This percentage is higher than most nursing homes. To our surprise, this place also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had just 0.75 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.