Merwick Care & Rehabilitation Center

We awarded this nursing home an A- for our short-term care grade. This is far more impressive than its overall score. In forming these short-term care ratings, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to formulate a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 5.9 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it earned an B. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. When calculating a facility's nursing rating, we weigh the amount of time nurses are seeing residents as well as the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of turning residents more often.

We also wanted to draw your attention to this facility's inspection grade where it received an F. You should pay close attention to any deficiencies on a nursing home's inspection reports when it receives this bad of an inspection score. We suggest you scrutinize the severity of the deficiencies. Unfortunately, it does not appear that we have deficiency data for this nursing home. Finally, we also need to point out that this facility received significant government fines in recent years of over $100,000. This generally suggests that a facility's poor performance has been an issue for multiple years.

Moving on to our last area, this facility really didn't perform very well. With an abysmal grade of F in long-term care, this was this nursing home's poorest category. When nursing homes receive this kind of score in long-term care it is typically a bad sign for patient care and it may mean that the facility is not as well-staffed with nurses and aids. After assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. Frankly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this facility vaccinated 70.159454 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which happens to be quite a bit lower than what we were hoping for. Surprisingly, this facility was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.