South Portland Nursing Home

This facility received a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its nearly flawless inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Inspection grades are based on datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this area tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe made us feel better about this inspection report.

This facility also excelled in our nursing category, where it received an B. Few nursing homes fared better in this area. Nursing scores are heavily correlated with levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facilities third best area was short-term care. We gave it a grade of B- in this category. This is essentially a middle of the pack score in this area. In calculating our short-term care grades, we size up a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This grade is considered to be a fair measure of the facility's rehabilitation. Unfortunately, it does not look like this nursing home provided information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually quite a bit below average.

Moving on to our fourth category, we gave this nursing home a D for our long-term care category. This is the nursing home's worst category rating. Of course, this category hurt the facility's overall grade to a certain degree. Nursing homes that receive this kind of score in long-term care likely don't provide the type of consistent 24/7 care that some other facilities provide. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. Frankly, we were a bit alarmed this facility vaccinated 84.745766 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which happens to be several points less than what we were hoping for. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. This was its best score in this category.