Meadowbrook Nursing Center

We also found that this facility excelled in long-term care. We gave them an A+ in this category. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. After considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 99.06542 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is significantly higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In addition, this facility also received top notch government inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our better scores in that category, with an A-. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection ratings. One key factor is 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 quite minor. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. The nursing grade includes several datapoints. The most heavily weighted one is the number of hours nurses spend with patients. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning patients more often.

The next category we rated was short-term care, in which this facility received a grade of C. Even though this wound up being its poorest category score, this is still not a major area of concern. In determining our short-term care ratings, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The purpose is to devise a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. It does not look like this facility submitted data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The last datapoint we considered in this area is the percentage of residents that returned home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.