Miller's Merry Manor

The main reason this facility received a decent overall grade is its excellent health inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our better scores in that category, with a grade of A-. This is a notably better score than the facility's overall score, which was decent but not in the elite range. These inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

One of this nursing home's better category grades came in the area of short-term care. This ended up being its second most favorable category. In that category, we gave this facility a B-. Our short-term care scores are based on a facility's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a broad scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. We found that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we assessed. The facility offered fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is important to determine whether this is adversely impacting the quality of care. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.3 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

We also awarded this nursing home a middle of the road grade in the area of long-term care, where we awarded it a C. With our long-term care score, we focus more on the sheer quantity of services provided by a nursing home, along with a handful of qualitative measures. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Frankly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this facility provided the vaccine to just 76.1745 percent of its residents. Nevertheless, this nursing home excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The final area we rated is nursing. It received an F in this category, which is a poor grade. This is certainly a major disappointment. There are quite a few criteria included in this area. Many of the criteria are tied to staffing levels. This facility averaged a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. On top of rating below average in nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also had poor marks in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This nursing home was at about 150 percent of the national average in both of these statistics. This is a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. These scores pulled down this nursing home's nursing rating quite a bit.