Signature Healthcare of Muncie

While this facility's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the area of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our best scores. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This place received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies an imminent threat to resident health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

In addition, we also would like to point out that this facility was awarded favorable short-term care marks in this assessment. We gave them one of our more impressive grades in that area, with a B+. This turned out to be the nursing home's second highest grade. Short-term care grades are often used to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have highly scored rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final statistic we considered in this area is the number of patients that ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. Nursing grades are primarily tied to a nursing home's nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, while this facility got dinged a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it excelled in a few of our quality measures. With less than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed very well in this metric.

This nursing home's least impressive area was long-term care, which is the last area we looked at. Sadly, it received an abysmal F for this area. Even with several respectable scores in other categories, this score is nevertheless concerning so we would like to to make a note of it. Facilities that don't score well in long-term care often don't provide as much nursing care and also may be struggling in some of the areas of routine medical care we assessed. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We were a bit alarmed this facility provided the vaccine to a relatively low 64.893616 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this nursing home was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.