Meadowbrook Care Center

One of the reasons this ended up being a decent facility is it received a very favorable inspection score. In this category, we gave this nursing home a B+. Inspection scores weigh several factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with better grades in this area generally have very few of these severe deficiencies. While this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple of minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

Building on this facility's list of strengths, it also received an excellent nursing grade. We gave them an impressive grade of B- in this area. Our nursing grade is primarily based on the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This place provides only 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a somewhat uninspiring figure as it is well below the national average. Finally, nursing grades also factor in quality-based measures, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this facility performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is often a good indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls can be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses to assist its residents.

This nursing home's third highest category turned out to be short-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a B-. With our short-term care category, we attempt to create a meaningful gauge for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess the facility's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the metrics we assessed. The important question is whether this adversely impacted quality of care. The last statistic we looked at in this area is the number of residents that were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 5.3 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The final category we rated was long-term care. It received a lowly F in this category, which is an abysmal grade. This is certainly a significant disappointment. Nursing homes that don't fare well in this category often do not provide as much nursing care and also may be struggling in some of the areas of routine personal care we assessed. One of the criteria we considered on top of nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to just 61.878452 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This was its best score in this category.