Springmeade Healthcenter

Although we did not rate this nursing home highly overall, we want to point out its excellent health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Arguably the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. It is generally best to avoid places that have a long list of deficiencies. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

The next highest category we gave this nursing home in any category came in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a C. Our short-term care grades are considered to be more meaningful for folks needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing services. This means not just nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. In this place's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The last datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of residents that returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.6 percent of this facility's residents returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.

This nursing home's second lowest score is long-term care, where it earned a grade of just D in that category. This is a relatively poor score. Nursing homes that receive this type of score in long-term care may not provide the type of consistent around the clock care that some other facilities provide. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination statistics. We were somewhat surprised to discover that this facility vaccinated a relatively low 66.784454 percent of its residents for pneumonia. To our surprise, this facility was actually decent at keeping its patients 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.

The next area we analyzed is nursing, turned out to be this facility's worst category. We gave this facility a D in that category. We scrutinized the licensure of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time those nurses spent with residents, in determining our score in this category. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. To go along with its below average total nursing hours per patient, this place had poor scores in many of the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of patients having falls which led to major injury. This facility was at more than 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is alarming in light of the fact that many falls could likely be avoided with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the facility's fate of receiving a poor nursing rating.