Meadow Lake Senior Living

This facility received a strong overall grade as described above, but we especially want to emphasize its excellent short-term care grade. We gave them an impressive grade of A in this area. In our short-term care grade, we try to craft a meaningful gauge for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we assess the 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 nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the percentage of residents that returned home from the facility. We found that 5.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

In addition, this nursing home also performed well in inspections, which is based on the facility's inspection reports. We gave it an A- for that category, which is one of our top scores. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

Another strong feature for this facility is that it received an impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of B+. Our nursing score considers a number of subcategories. The most important variable is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next area we assessed is long-term care. In this category, we gave this nursing home a decent grade of B-. This actually turned out to be this nursing home's weakest category. Our long-term care ratings are more meaningful for patients in need of more conventional services related to personal care. Once we assessed the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 98.666664 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is higher than the average nursing home. This nursing home keeps its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.