Montgomery Children's Specialty Center

This nursing home received a strong overall score as described above, but we especially wanted to point out its excellent inspections in recent years. We gave it an impressive grade of A in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being relatively insignificant. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. A few relatively minor deficiencies are not something to panic about.

Among this facility's other strengths is its elite nursing grade. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of A-. Our nursing score is largely tied to a facility's nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Turning to the third category, this nursing home also received a score of B for its long-term care rating. This is a well above average score in this area. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 92.77109 percent of its patients, which is a few points below what we were hoping for. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The last area we looked at was short-term care. In this category, we awarded this facility a decent grade of C. This is this facility's weakest area. Short-term care ratings are crucial for individuals requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a wide scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. We were not able to track down information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. The final item we assessed in this category is the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.