Otterbein Springboro

This nursing home received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its excellent health inspections in recent years. We gave them an A- in this category. Arguably the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better scores in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this place had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

The second highest grade we gave this nursing home in any area came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of B-. Nursing ratings are largely based on a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This facility averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient each day, which is a very low figure. Lastly, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics. Although this facility got docked a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it actually excelled in some of these quality metrics. With fewer than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed well in this metric. This is typically a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of turning a patient even once per day.

This nursing home's third best area is its long-term care grade, where it was awarded a B-. In the area of long-term care, we focus on the amount of services offered by a nursing home, as opposed to more medically-intensive services. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is a very solid figure. This nursing home keeps its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Our last category is short-term care, where we awarded this nursing home a B- in that category. Short-term care grades are typically employed to judge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the number of residents that were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.8 percent of this facility's patients returned home.