Spring Mill Meadows

In addition to being a respectable nursing home overall, this place really excelled in the area of inspections, where it earned an A. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

We also would like to point out that this nursing home was awarded a strong short-term care score. Indeed, we awarded it one of our best scores in that area with a score of A-. Short-term care grades are critical for prospective residents in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes more skilled nursing. This means a wide spectrum of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.3 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Next, we looked at the nursing category where we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-, which is a decent grade. Our nursing rating is based on a variety of datapoints. The most heavily weighted variable is the number of hours nurses spend with patients. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures. While this place got docked a bit for nursing hours, it actually excelled in a few of these quality measures. With fewer than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it fared remarkably well in this metric. This is typically a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of turning residents at least once a day.

Moving on to our fourth area, we gave this facility a grade of D in our long-term care category. This is the facility's worst category score. Naturally, this score hurt the nursing home's overall profile a bit. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary goal is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility provided the vaccine to 94.73684 percent of its patients, which is a very respectable datapoint. Surprisingly, this nursing home also keeps its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.