Meriden Center

Meriden Center is located in Meriden, Connecticut. This facility appears to be among the better facilities we looked at. A score of this caliber requires high-end marks across the board. You really can't do much better than this place. This nursing home was also given strong grades in all of the major categories. More information about these categories can be found below.

In addition to being a first rate nursing home overall, this nursing home also excelled in the category of short-term care, where it received an impressive grade of A. Our short-term care scores are thought to be more important for those requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not only nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. This nursing home boosted its score in this category by offering more physical therapy hours to its residents than the average facility. The final measure we assessed in this area is the number of residents who returned home from the facility. We found that it performed as well as just about any facility in Connecticut in this area with 63.3 percent of its residents returning home. At most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

This facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating these inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these end up being relatively insignificant. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. You can't do much better than a deficiency-free inspection report.

Turning to another strength for this facility, we gave them one of our more favorable grades in our long-term care category as well, with a grade of B+. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care tend to provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 99.731186 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients out of the hospital. Lastly, we looked at the nursing home's number of hospitalizations. Here we found that this place had 2.39 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days.

The last area we scored is this nursing home's weakest category. Nevertheless, even its weakest link would actually be a highlight for most nursing homes. In fact, we gave it an above average grade of B in our nursing category. When determining our nursing ratings, we factor in both nursing hours and the training levels of those nurses. This nursing home averages 3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at a few quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home excelled in these areas, with excellent scores for minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care a nursing home provides.