Meadows Ridge Care Center

While we did not rate this nursing home favorably overall, we want to point out its relatively favorable long-term care grade this year. We gave it a B in this category, which was much better than its overall score. Facilities that excel in this category tend to provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 98.98305 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B-. Nursing grades are based largely on quantity of nursing care available. This particular nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This figure is significantly below the national average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility actually excelled in some of the quality measures we assessed. It performed well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

This nursing home earned mediocre inspections in recent years. We awarded them a C in this area. These inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This place was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were category G through L deficiencies. This tells you this facility dodged the more significant categories of deficiencies. Finally, we want to point out that this nursing home has been assessed government fines in recent years. We were relieved to find that these were not on the high end as government fines go. However, this isn't what we like to find.

The last area we analyzed was short-term care, which turned out to be this facility's weakest category. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D in this area. In computing our short-term care scores, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our goal is to create a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The last metric we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar metrics was damning for this facility's short-term care grade.