Meridian Nursing Home

On top of being a quality nursing home overall, this facility really excelled in the area of inspections, where it received a grade of A+. Not many facilities fared better in that category. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This nursing home received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This tells you that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate threat to resident health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among this nursing home's other achievements is its top-shelf long-term care grade. We awarded them one of our best scores in that category, with a score of A-. For prospective patients seeking a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 89.393936 percent of its residents. This is somewhat less than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This facility's next best category grade came in the area of nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of C. This wasn't quite on par with some of its other category grades mentioned above. There are quite a few factors included in this area. Many of the subcategories relate to levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This figure is far below the national average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this place actually fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In fact, it performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

The final category we analyzed is short-term care, which turned out to be this facility's least impressive area. We gave this facility a grade of D in this category. Naturally, this score hurt the facility's overall grade a bit. In computing our short-term care grades, we look at the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. This score is often a reliable measure of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Unfortunately, this nursing home was below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The last measure we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics doomed this facility's short-term care score.