Northwest Hospital Center Subacute Unit

Located in Randallstown, Maryland, Northwest Hospital Center Subacute Unit is one of four nursing homes in the area. This nursing home proved to be an A+ rated facility, which is the absolute highest grade. In addition, this facility is also located in a hospital, which can often mean the nursing home offers a wider array of medical services. One of the major highlights of this facility's stellar profile is its short-term care score. We discuss short-term care in the next paragraph.

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ in the area of short-term care. In crafting our short-term care scores, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to create a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. This nursing home is substantially above the national average in terms of its quantity of both physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents. In fact, it provided about 50% more care per resident from both of these care providers than the average facility provided. These are generally good indicators of quality short-term care. The last datapoint we assessed in this category is the number of patients that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that it fared as well as just about any nursing home in Maryland in this area with 72.5 percent of its patients returning home.

This facility has also received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Inspection grades weigh several factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher scores in this category generally have few severe deficiencies. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also fared very well in the category of long-term care, where it received a score of A. Only a select group of facilities received a better grade in this category. For prospective residents seeking a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are a key measure. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. It doesn't appear that this facility submitted data regarding vaccinations. Clearly, this nursing home 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 one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Moving on to our next area, this facility also performed well in the nursing category. In fact, we gave it an A- for this category. This finalized a straight A report card. Our nursing score is based on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the quantity of hours spent with patients. This particular nursing home provided 4.6 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This was one of the better totals we found. In addition, a significant portion of this care was provided by registered nurses, which are highly skilled nurses. On top of providing impressive levels of nursing care, this facility also excelled in the quality measures we looked at. By way of illustration, it performed as well as any nursing home in the nation when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We look at these metrics as predictive indicators of the quality of nursing care being provided.