Signature Healthcare at Mallard Bay

Signature Healthcare at Mallard Bay is a large nursing home located in Cambridge, Maryland. We gave this facility an overall grade of B. A score of this caliber requires respectable scores in most areas. Based on our ratings, you could do much worse than this place. The best part of this place's profile was is its short-term care rating. short-term care grades are discussed in the next paragraph.

In addition to earning a strong overall grade, this facility performed well in our short-term care category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our highest grades. Short-term care ratings are based on a facility's quantity of skilled highly skilled professionals. This includes a wide scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. When we assessed this facility's nursing hours, we found it offered more care from registered nurses than most nursing homes. The final datapoint we assessed in this category is the number of patients that ultimately returned home from the facility. It performed as well as just about any nursing home in Maryland in this area with 65.5 percent of its patients returning home. At most nursing homes, less than half of their short-term patients ever return home.

Turning to another one of this nursing home's strengths, it also earned a very impressive inspection score. In fact, inspections turned out to be one of its best categories. We gave this facility an A-. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in computing these inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively minor. This nursing home was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to resident health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. The nursing grade assesses several subcategories, but the most important consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provides an impressive 3.5 hours of nursing care per resident daily. Of this total, more than one fourth of these hours were provided by registered nurses, which is among the most highly trained levels of nurses. We apply more weight to hours provided by skilled nurses in determining our nursing scores. Finally, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as predictive indicators of the quality of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The final category we assessed is long-term care. We gave it an F in this category, which is a rock bottom score. We would not necessarily disregard a nursing home as a result of one poor grade though. Long-term care ratings of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids, as well as the levels of routine medical care available. After considering the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination record. We were concerned by the fact that this facility vaccinated just 74.098366 percent of its patients against pneumonia. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had just 0.37 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.