Otterbein Middletown

In addition to being a great nursing home overall, it also received A+ government inspections in recent years. Its inspections were nearly perfect. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are quite minor. Although this place had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

This nursing home was awarded high scores in the area of short-term care as well. Consequently, we awarded it one of our strongest grades in that category with a score of A. In computing our short-term care grades, we look at the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This grade is frequently a fair measure of the nursing home's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we considered in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We found that 6.3 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

This nursing home's next best area came in the area of long-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B-. For prospective residents looking for a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are a key measure. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. We were pleased to find that this nursing home vaccinated 98.26087 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Finally, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The final category we assessed is nursing. This facility received a strong nursing rating in our assessment, with a grade of C. Even though this wasn't as dominant as a few of its other category grades, this is nevertheless a respectable rating in that area. Our nursing score weighs many subcategories. The most heavily weighted one is the quantity of hours nurses spent with patients. This nursing home averages just 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home surprisingly fared better in some of the quality measures we assessed. In fact, it performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the number of hours of care provided.