Regency Care of Silver Spring

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it received an elite inspection score. Its inspection grade was far superior to its overall score. In our inspections category, we gave it an A-. Our inspection grades are based on items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this category tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This nursing home was assessed 14 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to resident health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.

We also would like to point out that this nursing home was awarded a strong short-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it one of our best grades in that area with a grade of A-. In forming these short-term care ratings, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to formulate a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. This facility provided more physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most nursing homes. Lastly, we looked at the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. In addition to excelling in the area of physical therapy hours, we found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in the country in this area with 57.4 percent of its patients returning home.

An additional reason we rated this facility so highly is that it earned an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. The nursing rating weighs many components, most of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 3.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The next category we assessed was long-term care. We gave it an F in this area, which is a bottom of the barrel score. This is certainly a significant disappointment. For prospective residents in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are very important. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. We were pleased to discover that this facility vaccinated 98.02956 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 1.04 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home has less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.