Merit House

The primary reason this ended up being a decent nursing home is that it earned an elite inspection score. Its inspection grade was far superior to its overall grade. In our inspections category, we gave this facility an A. These inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these issues by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

Another one of this nursing home's better category scores was in the area of short-term care. In that category, we awarded this facility a grade of B. It actually performed better than most nursing homes in this category. Our short-term care scores are based in part on the facility's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a vast spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, in addition to other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.5 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

We also gave this facility a solid grade in the category of long-term care, with a grade of B-. In crafting our long-term care grades, we look at the facility's ability to maintain its permanent residents' health and quality of life. On top of considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 90.10989 percent of its residents. This is many points less than what we were hoping for. Nevertheless, this facility was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Moving on to the next category, this facility received a C for nursing, which is generally a decent rating. Nursing ratings are based largely on quality and quantity of nursing care. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, we like to look at quality-based statistics, such as the percent of patients who experienced pressure ulcers and major falls. Sometimes these metrics are decent measures of the quality of nursing care.