Riderwood

On top of receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received an A+ short-term care grade. In determining our short-term care scores, we scrutinize a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This rating is often a useful assessment of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.8 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Another reason we rated this nursing home so highly is that it received an A+ nursing grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. 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 98.37838 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.