Austintown Healthcare Center

While we were not high on this facility overall, we awarded it an A+ for our inspections rating. This score is far more impressive than the nursing home's overall grade. Our inspection grades are based on pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key item to look for on these inspections. Most importantly, you should avoid nursing homes that have severe deficiencies associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

Unfortunately, this nursing home's next highest category was long-term care. Nevertheless, with a D in this area, it still fared somewhat badly. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 63.020832 percent of its residents. This is several points less than what we expected. Surprisingly, this facility was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.

This facility ended up receiving a rock-bottom grade in our short-term care area. It was given a lowly F in this category. With our short-term care category, we strive to craft a meaningful barometer for rehabilitation services. In this process, we look at a facility's scope of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Considering its grade in this area, we were not surprised to find that this nursing home is well below average in terms of the number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the metrics we looked at. The last measure we looked at in this area is the number of patients who eventually returned home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 4.8 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was well below average.

The next category we scored was nursing. This facility received a bottom of the barrel grade of F in that area. Our nursing grade weighs many factors, but the main one is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home averaged just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This number is significantly below the national average. Unfortunately, this place also had terrible scores in some of the quality-based metrics to go along with its low nursing hours. For starters, we looked at the percent of patients sustaining pressure ulcers. This facility was at more than double the national average in this metric.