Sheridan Memorial Nursing Home

To go along with its strong overall grade, we gave this nursing home an A- for our long-term care score. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. One of the criteria we considered after nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a proven method to minimize unnecessary hospitalizations for the senior population. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Adding to its impressive category grades, we awarded this facility a grade of B+ for inspections. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this category typically dodged the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Turning to another strength for this facility, we awarded them one of our more positive grades in our short-term care category as well, with a B. Our short-term care scores are based in part on the nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a broad scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final measure we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

Moving on to the final category, this nursing home received a grade of B- for nursing, which is generally a decent grade. In determining a facility's nursing score, we consider the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients and the level of skill of the nurses. This place provided just 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, we like to look at quality-based metrics, such as the percentage of residents who suffered pressure ulcers and major falls. Sometimes these statistics are decent measures of the quality of nursing care.