Autumn Lake Healthcare at Overlea

While this nursing home's overall grade was not a highlight, it actually really excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A- for that area, which is one of our best scores. Inspection ratings are based on many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important item to look for on these reports. Most importantly, you should avoid facilities that have severe deficiencies linked to endangerment of patients. While this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

One of the other reasons we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing score. In fact, nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility an D. Our nursing grade considers a variety of factors. The most heavily weighted variable is the quantity of hours nurses spent with residents. This facility provided only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is not a very impressive figure. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. This nursing home fared well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these statistics to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.

We gave this nursing home just a D for our short-term care score. This is not a score to write home about. Our short-term care grade is often employed to score a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation In order to have highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. With a grade of this caliber in this area, we weren't shocked to find this place was well below average in the two key staffing metrics we assess. The nursing home provided significantly fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most facilities. The last metric we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics was damning for this facility's short-term care grade.

The next category we looked at is long-term care. This facility was given a very poor grade of F in that area. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to a relatively low 27.160496 percent of its residents, which is several points lower than we expected. Surprisingly, this facility actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.