Sanford Chamberlain Care Center

To go along with a great overall grade, we awarded this facility an A for our inspections rating. Our inspection scores weigh several factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area typically have very few of these severe deficiencies. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report, which is still very impressive. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also would like to emphasize the fact that this nursing home was given an impressive grade of A- in our long-term care category. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. Once we concluded our assessment of the quantity of nursing care, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 96.815285 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia tragically can be a life or death condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home does not leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Turning to another strength for this nursing home, we awarded them one of our more favorable grades in our short-term care category as well, with a B+. With our short-term care assessment, we try to forge a sound measure for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess the nursing home's offerings of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they 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 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The next category we rated is nursing. In that category, we gave this nursing home a strong grade of B. Nursing scores are tied to quantity of nursing care available. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also factored a few quality measures into our nursing grades. This nursing home was relatively weak in two of the major areas we focus on, with below average scores for minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. These areas are generally reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care provided.