Orono Commons

The primary reason this facility received a decent overall grade is its impeccable inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our better scores in that category, with a grade of A. This is a much better score than the facility's overall score, which was decent but certainly not elite. Inspection ratings weigh a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with better grades in this area generally have few severe deficiencies. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

Turning to the category of short-term care, we gave this nursing home a grade of A- in that area. In computing our short-term care ratings, we look at a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This score is typically a meaningful assessment of a facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last datapoint we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 5.2 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of B-. Our nursing score consists of many factors, but the main one is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This particular nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This figure is far below the national average. Finally, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally a reliable indicator that a facility has quality controls in place.

This facility's worst category is long-term care, which is the last category we analyzed. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F for this category. Even with some decent grades in other categories, this score is still disappointing so we would like to to draw your attention to it. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it generally means the facility did not perform well in our quality measures relating to patient care. After we finished looking at the volume of nursing care, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. Candidly, we were a bit concerned this nursing home vaccinated only 48.373985 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Surprisingly, this facility was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.