Riderwood

One of the reasons this place received a great overall grade is that it earned an A+ in short-term care. In determining our short-term care ratings, we analyze the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This score is often a meaningful assessment of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of residents that eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 6.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In fact, this turned out to be its second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. Our nursing rating includes numerous datapoints. The most heavily weighted factor is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the state in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of turning patients even once per day.

Another quality feature of this facility is its inspection grade. In that category, we gave this facility an A. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with better grades in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Moving on to our last category, this nursing home also excelled in our long-term care category. In fact, we gave it an A- for that category. This completed a straight A profile. When facilities receive this kind of grade in this category it is a good sign for patient care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 97.65258 percent of its residents, which is far higher than most nursing homes. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.