Norwalk Meadows Nursing Center

While this place's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform terribly in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a B- for that category, which is one of our better scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some can be quite insignificant. This facility was hit with 7 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to resident safety or health. Lastly, this nursing home was cited by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. This is generally a really bad sign. We would never recommend this facility.

Turning to the area of nursing care, this facility received a grade of just D in this category. Unfortunately, this ended up being one of its better grades. Nursing scores are largely associated with a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home averaged just 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident daily. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing ratings. This place performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

This facility's second least favorable category is short-term care, where it earned a grade of just D in that category. This is a well below average score. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to score a facility's performance with rehabilitation In order to offer highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to have better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Based on its grade in this category, we were not stunned to discover that this facility was well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its patients based on the figures we looked at. Honestly, this was about what we expected here. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. This was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4.3 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their residents are able to return home so this is well below average.

This facility's worst area is long-term care, which is the final category we assessed. For this area, we gave this facility a D. If you are looking for anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care scores. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.05 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.