Memorial Community Care

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ long-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. When facilities receive this type of grade in long-term care it is a good sign for patient care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is far higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

In addition, this nursing home also earned a nearly flawless government inspection report. As a result, it earned one of our best grades in that category with an A. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing our inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being quite insignificant. This place was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A. Nursing scores are largely based on a facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The fourth area we looked at is short-term care, where this facility was awarded an A-. This finished off a very favorable profile. Few nursing homes earned an A- or higher in all four categories. Short-term care grades are often used to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide high-end rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last metric we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.