Severna Park Center

This nursing home received a quality overall grade as described above, but we especially wanted to point out its nearly flawless government inspections in recent years. We awarded them an A- in this area. Inspection grades are based on several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this area have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in the industry.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. In that area, we gave this nursing home an B+. We scrutinized the levels of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the quantity of hours those nurses spent with patients, in determining our score in this category. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

We also gave this facility a respectable score in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a B-. Our short-term care grades are considered to be more meaningful for residents requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not merely nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.3 percent of this facility's residents returned home. This figure was below the national average.

The final category we rated was long-term care. We awarded this nursing home a grade of C in this area. Our long-term care scores are more meaningful for those requiring more conventional assistance related to personal care. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We discovered that this nursing home vaccinated only 70.74627 percent of its residents, which is quite a bit lower than we expected. Fortunately, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.