Providence Pine Meadows

The primary reason this nursing home received a decent overall grade is its impeccable health inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our higher scores in that category, with an A-. This is a much better grade than the place's overall grade, which was decent but certainly not elite. Inspection ratings are based on many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that receive favorable grades in this area tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning to the category of long-term care, we gave this nursing home a score of A- in that area. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 86.81592 percent of its patients, which is slightly below what we were hoping for. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Another strength of this facility is its favorable grade in nursing. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with an D. The nursing rating features several subcategories. The most heavily weighted factor is the amount of time nurses spent with residents. This place averaged a meager 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This statistic is far below average. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing ratings. This nursing home performed well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these metrics to be indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The last area we graded is short-term care, is this nursing home's least impressive area. We awarded this facility a grade of D in this area. This is one of just a few weak links in a very solid report card. Our short-term care grade is typically employed to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer higher levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. In this nursing home's case, we found that it provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The last datapoint we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.1 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics was damning for this facility's short-term care grade.