Merrimack County Nursing Home

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to be an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Among its many elite scores, this facility was given a strong long-term care score. In fact, it received a score of A in this category. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to provide patients with better supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 96.28205 percent of its residents, which is more than the vast majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

We also want to alert you to the fact that this nursing home was given a first-rate score of A in our short-term care category. Our short-term care ratings are considered to be more meaningful for individuals needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 7.2 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

In the last category we analyzed, this facility was awarded a very strong grade of B+ in our nursing category. With this grade, the facility finished off an elite report card. The nursing grade analyzes many factors, many of which are associated with quantities of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as predictive measures of the quality of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.