Senior Care of Midland

While this nursing home's overall score was not a highlight, it actually really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that area, which is one of our best scores. Our inspection grades are based on items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important item to look for on these reports. You should especially avoid facilities with severe deficiencies linked to endangerment of patients. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

This nursing home also was given a favorable grade in our long-term care category. We awarded this facility a better than average grade of B in this category. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In our next category, we gave this facility an F in the area of short-term care. In calculating our short-term care grades, we analyze a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This rating is typically a fair measure of the facility's rehabilitation. With its abysmal rating in this category, we weren't surprised to find that this place offered far fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than most facilities. The final metric we assessed in this area is the number of patients who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4.3 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was quite a bit below the national average.

Turning to the fourth category, this facility really didn't perform well in this area either. With a poor grade of F in nursing, this is about as as uninspiring as it gets. Our nursing grade is based on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of training of the nurses and the amount of time spent with patients. This particular nursing home averaged just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This figure is far below the national average. In addition to ranking below average in nursing hours per resident, this facility also had poor marks in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of patients sustaining major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility was at approximately 150 percent of the national average in both of these statistics. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are preventable with better nursing care. These scores helped pull down this nursing home's nursing grade significantly.