Meadowood

In addition to being an elite facility overall, this facility also performed well in our inspections category, where it earned an A+. Very few places performed this well in this category. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This nursing home received 9 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to create an immediate risk to patient safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Our nursing score is largely tied to a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 facility the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving residents more frequently.

The next area we analyzed was short-term care. This nursing home performed remarkably in our short-term care rating as well. We awarded them an elite grade of A+ in this category. Short-term care scores are based on the facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a broad scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final item we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 6.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

The next category we assessed was long-term care, in which this nursing home was given a grade of B. Even though this is its least impressive category grade, this is nevertheless an impressive rating. Facilities that receive this type of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent 24/7 care to make sure patients are kept in good health. After we finished assessing the volume of care provided by nurses, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly is often a deadly ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a facility does not leave this to chance. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.