Marywood Nursing Care Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great facility is that it received a strong short-term care grade. In that area, we gave this nursing home an impressive grade of A. Our short-term care grades are important for patients looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates higher levels of skilled nursing. This means a wide spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 7.1 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

To complement its strong performance in other areas, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Nursing scores are mostly associated with the facility's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.5 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 generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home also received a nearly flawless inspection report. As a result, it earned 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 ratings. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively minor. Although this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

The fourth area we assessed is long-term care, where this nursing home was given a B+. This rounded out a first-rate report card. Very few facilities earned a B+ or better in each of our categories. Nursing homes that receive this type of score in long-term care typically provide consistent around the clock care to make sure residents are well cared for. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is often a life or death health condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.