Skilled Caring Center of Memorial Hospital

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. 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 usually more important than the number of deficiencies, as some can be quite insignificant. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like we were able to find deficiency data for this facility. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also gave this facility a score of A+ for its short-term care grade. Short-term care grades are typically employed to judge a facility's rehabilitation services. In order to have highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final metric we looked at in this category is the number of residents that returned home from the facility. We found that 6.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Moving on our next area, this facility was given first-rate long-term care score. In fact, it received a grade of A in that area. If you are looking for anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care ratings. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. We weren't able to track down information on vaccination rates. Clearly, this nursing home 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 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Moving on to the fourth area, this nursing home received a high-end nursing grade. We awarded it an A- in this area, rounding out a straight A profile. When calculating our nursing scores, we weigh both nursing hours and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home averages 0.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these areas as predictive indicators of the quality of nursing care offered, since better care tends to reduce these problems.