Patapsco Valley Center

The main reason this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an elite nursing grade. In fact, we gave this facility a grade of A-. The nursing grade weighs a handful of datapoints, however, the most important consideration is the quantity of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided 3.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at a few quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place excelled in these areas, with excellent scores for minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care a nursing home provides.

This nursing home also was given a strong short-term care score. In fact, we gave it a grade of B+ in that area, which happens to be one of our more favorable scores. In the area of short-term care, we attempt to qualify indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses and physical and occupational therapists. One of this nursing home's strengths is registered nurse hours. We found that it offers more care from registered nurses to its residents than most facilities. The last item we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to return home from the nursing home. It performed better than most facilities in this area with 55.3 percent of its patients returning home.

Turning to the area of health inspections, we gave this nursing home a grade of C for our inspection category. Our inspection ratings are based on several items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key thing to look for on these inspections. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to the well being of residents. This nursing home had 9 deficiencies on its government inspection report, but fortunately none were category G through L deficiencies. This indicates that inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to create an imminent danger to resident health or safety. We didn't consider anything on this nursing home's inspection report to be too concerning.

This nursing home's worst category was long-term care, which is the final area we assessed. In this category, we gave this facility a D. Long-term care grades in this range generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 88.83249 percent of its patients. This is pretty significantly lower than what we expected. Surprisingly, this facility actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 1.33 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.