Otterbein SeniorLife Cridersville

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it received an excellent inspection grade. Its inspection grade was far superior to its overall score. In our inspections category, we gave this facility an A-. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection scores. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively insignificant. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

An additional strength of this facility is its elite score in short-term care. We awarded them one of our better grades in that category, with a grade of A-. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to gauge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To have quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.9 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Unfortunately, this facility's next best category was long-term care. Nevertheless, with a D in this area, it still performed relatively poorly. For prospective residents looking for a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are an important measure. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents, which is higher than the vast majority of nursing homes. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than many nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

The next category we analyzed is nursing, which proved to be this facility's weakest area. We awarded this facility a D in this category. Sadly, this score pulled down the facility's overall profile to a certain degree. When determining our nursing scores, we look at both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of the nurses. This place averaged a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is an alarmingly low total. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this nursing home also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This place had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average nursing home.