The Meadows of Ottawa

To go along with its decent overall score, we awarded this nursing home an A for its inspection grade. This grade is far better than its overall rating. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating our inspection scores. One key factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively insignificant. While this place had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

In addition, we also wanted to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home received impressive long-term care marks in this assessment. We awarded them one of our higher grades in this area, with a grade of B. This proved to be the nursing home's second best grade. Facilities that excel in this category tend to provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. After we finished assessing the volume of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 96.09929 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is too frequently a life or death illness for nursing home residents so we like it when a facility does not leave this to chance. 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 less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Another strength of this nursing home is its favorable grade in nursing. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with an impressive grade of D. In calculating a nursing home's nursing grade, we look at the amount of time nurses commit to residents and the level of licensure of those nurses. This place averaged just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is an alarmingly low total. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. This place performed well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these statistics to be measures of the quality of nursing care.

Switching gears to our next area, we awarded this facility a grade of D in the area of short-term care. This was the facility's least impressive category score. Sadly, this grade hurt the facility's overall profile to some degree. Our short-term care grade is often used to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To have good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. In this place's case, it looks like it offers fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the typical facility. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.