Mercy Home

In addition to performing well in its overall grade, this facility received an excellent long-term care grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in long-term care typically provide consistent around the clock care to make sure patients are kept in good health. After we finished assessing the amount of care provided by nurses, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination statistics. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a life or death ailment for nursing home patients so we prefer when a nursing home does not take any chances. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. In that category, we gave this nursing home an A. The nursing category consists of a handful of factors, most of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed 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 nursing home Maine in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a policy of moving patients even once per day.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A for our inspections rating. Inspection scores account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher scores in this area typically have few severe deficiencies. While this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Moving on to our final category, this nursing home also performed well in the short-term care category. We awarded it an A- in that area. This finalized truly elite report card. In calculating our short-term care grades, we assess a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other types of therapists. This score is frequently a useful measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.