Otterbein Middletown

With an address in Franklin, Ohio, Otterbein Middletown is one of only three nursing homes in this city. With an A overall grade, we rated this nursing home in the top 20 percent of all facilities in the nation. In our view, this facility ought to be a no brainer for most people. Headlining this place's exemplary report card is its inspection grade, which we will address in the next paragraph.

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This nursing home was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to be an immediate threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This first-rate facility also performed well in the category of long-term care, where we gave it a score of A+. Few facilities fared better in this category. Facilities that receive this type of score in long-term care typically provide consistent around the clock care to make sure patients are kept in good health. On top of providing elite levels of nurse staffing, this nursing home gave the pneumonia vaccine to 97.81022 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 1.58 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home.

Turning the page to our next area, this facility was given a top-shelf short-term care score. In fact, we awarded it a score of A in this area. In our short-term care grade, we strive to forge a valuable measure for rehabilitation. In this process, we look at the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. The final measure we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from the nursing home. We found that it fared as well as just about any facility in Ohio in this area with 68.2 percent of its residents returning home. Unfortunately, at most facilities, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

The next area we assessed turned out to be this nursing home's weakest area. Nevertheless, even in its worst category we still awarded it a decent grade of B- in our nursing category. The nursing rating assesses a handful of subcategories, but the most important one is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. With 5.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day, this nursing home surpassed the vast majority of facilities. Finally, we also looked at a few quality measures in calculating our nursing grades. This nursing home was above average in several of these data points, with good marks for minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. These data points are typically accurate indicators of the quality of nursing care a facility provides.