Otterbein Middletown

This nursing home received a strong overall grade as described above, but we especially want to emphasize its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We gave it an A+ in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection grades. One of those factors is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively insignificant. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

Contributing to this facility's list of accomplishments, it also was given a high-end short-term care score. We awarded them a strong grade of A- in this category. In forming our short-term care grades, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our purpose is to formulate a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final statistic we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 5.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Turning to the category of nursing care, this facility didn't perform quite as well in this area as some of the categories discussed above. Nevertheless, a grade of B- in this category is by no means a bad score. Our nursing grade weighs a variety of datapoints. The most heavily weighted factor is the amount of time nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics. While this place got dinged a bit for its nursing hours, it excelled in some of these quality-based measures. With fewer than five percent of its patients suffering from pressure ulcers, it fared well in this area. This can be an indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a policy of turning residents more frequently.

The last category we graded was long-term care. We awarded this nursing home a grade of C in that area. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination records. We were optimistic to discover that this nursing home vaccinated 98.34711 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Finally, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.