Medilodge of Farmington

While we graded this facility incredibly poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable short-term care grade this year. We gave it a B- in that area, which was the closest thing to a bright spot we can find for this place. Our short-term care ratings are important for patients requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a vast scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this place provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The final metric we looked at in this area is the number of residents who returned home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. This proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home an C. Nursing grades are based largely on quality and quantity of nursing care. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In fact, it scored well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the quantity of hours of care provided.

Among this place's worst category grades was an F for its inspection grade. Typically, this indicates we found some red flags on the facility's inspections. When a nursing home has this bad of an inspection score, you should expect some severe deficiencies on its inspection report. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to patient safety. This nursing home was hit with one category G through L deficiency, which are among the more severe deficiencies. This generally indicates that the deficiencies found by CMS had potential to cause actual harm to patients. Finally, we would like to point out that this facility received significant government fines amounting to more than $100,000. This generally suggests that a facility's bad performance spanned multiple years.

Turning to the fourth area, this facility didn't perform well here either. With a very poor grade of F in long-term care, this is really as bad as it gets. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination record. We were optimistic to find that this facility vaccinated 95.85253 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this place also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.05 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.