Sheridan Medical Lodge

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this area typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

This facility also was given a positive long-term care grade. As a matter of fact, we awarded them a grade of B+ in this area, which is one of our more favorable scores. Facilities that do well in this category tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. One of the statistics we considered after nurse's aid hours was vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 99.729 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a proven method to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The next area we graded is short-term care, where this nursing home was given an F. Our short-term care grades are thought to be more meaningful for patients requiring rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation typically utilizes more skilled nursing services. This includes not merely nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. With its grade in this category, we were not stunned to discover that this facility was well below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the measures we looked at. Frankly, this was what we expected here. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This wasn't a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.

The final category we scored was nursing, which proved to be this nursing home's worst area. It received an abysmal F in this category, which is certainly very concerning. In calculating our nursing grades, we assess both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of the nurses. This facility averaged only 0.2 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is not a very impressive figure. To pair with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this nursing home had really poor marks in several of the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing scores. For starters, we looked at the percent of patients sustaining falls leading to serious injury. This nursing home was at more than 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is quite alarming in light of the fact that so many falls could likely be prevented with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the nursing home's fate of receiving a poor nursing rating.