Quality Life Services - Mercer

While we did not rate this facility well overall, we wanted to note its decent inspections in recent years. We gave it a relatively respectable score of B- in this area. Inspection scores are based on pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important thing to look for on these inspections. Severe deficiencies indicate a threat to the well being of residents. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This tells you the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Lastly, this facility was flagged by CMS for possible abuse or neglect. We prefer to avoid facilities with this designation. Please do your best to find an alternative nursing home.

We also ended up giving this facility a fairly respectable grade in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B-. Our nursing score is primarily tied to a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This facility provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a much lower figure than we were hoping for. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based metrics, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this facility performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is usually an indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place. Some falls could be avoided if a facility supplies enough nurses aids to assist its residents.

The next area we looked at is short-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a solid grade of B-. Our short-term care ratings are meaningful for patients needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a wide scope of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Unfortunately, this place was below average in terms of its number of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The final datapoint we assessed in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is actually below average.

Our last area is long-term care, where we awarded this nursing home a C in that category. Long-term care grades are used to measure a facility's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services offered by a skilled nursing facility. After assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination statistics. Frankly, we were a bit alarmed this facility vaccinated 82.30769 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which happens to be significantly below what we were hoping for. Fortunately, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.