Royal Middletown Nursing Center

Royal Middletown Nursing Center is one of just three available facilities located in Middletown, Rhode Island. It looks like this nursing home is ranked among the highest-rated nursing homes we found. A grade in this range requires first-rate scores across the board. In fact, this facility has the prestigious distinction of being one of the top 50 nursing homes in Rhode Island. If you scroll down, you will see this facility's category scores, which are also impressive.

On top of faring well in its overall grade, this nursing home received high marks in the category of short-term care as well. It received our highest score in that category with an A+. Our short-term care grades are thought to be most critical for people requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation usually mandates additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes not merely nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Remarkably, this facility provides about one and a half times as many hours of services from physical therapists and registered nurses than most facilities we assessed. This is definitely a great sign. The final metric we assessed in this area is the number of patients that returned home from the nursing home. We found that it fared as well as just about any facility in Rhode Island in this area with 68.5 percent of its patients returning home. With most nursing homes, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. In that area, we gave this facility an A+. The nursing rating includes numerous factors. The most heavily weighted variable is the number of hours nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provides an impressive 3.6 hours of nursing care per patient per day. Out of this total, more than one fourth of those hours were provided by registered nurses, which is among the most highly skilled levels of nurses. We add more weight to hours worked by skilled nurses in determining our nursing scores. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. Inspection grades weigh several factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better scores in this category typically have few of these severe deficiencies. This place received 7 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to pose an imminent risk to patient safety or health. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

The final area we rated was long-term care, in which this facility was given a B. Believe it or not, this proved to be this facility's least impressive category. A nursing home could be doing a lot worse when their lowest grade still is superior to most other nursing homes. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 99.07407 percent of its residents, which is far higher than the average nursing home. Finally, we looked at its number of hospitalizations. We found that this place had 2.34 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days.