Sherwood Healthcare Center

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this place also excelled in the category of inspections, where it received an A. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some are quite minor. While this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS 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 lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This nursing home's second most favorable area is long-term care. We awarded it a C in this category. This is basically a middle of the pack grade in this category. Long-term care grades assess a nursing home's assistance with daily living rather than the highly skilled therapy and medical services that are critical to a rehabilitation facility. On top of considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 98.765434 percent of its patients, which is more than the vast majority of nursing homes. This nursing home keeps its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Moving on to another strength for this facility, it also received an elite nursing score. We gave this facility an D. Nursing ratings are heavily correlated with nurse staffing levels. With only 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below average. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in calculating our nursing ratings. This place performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these metrics to be measures of the quality of nursing care.

The last category we looked at is short-term care, turned out to be this facility's least impressive category. We gave this nursing home a D in that category. In forming our short-term care ratings, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The purpose is to create a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. With a grade this poor in this category, we weren't shocked to find that this facility was below average in the two key staffing figures we looked at. It provided significantly fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than most nursing homes. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. This definitely was not a strength for this nursing home. We found that just 4.5 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.