Springmeade Healthcenter

While we were not high on this nursing home overall, we awarded it an A- for our inspections rating. This score is significantly more impressive than the facility's overall grade. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining our inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively insignificant. This facility received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be severe. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies an immediate risk to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

This facility's second best category came in the area of short-term care. In that area, we gave this nursing home a C. Our short-term care grades are arguably most important for patients in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually mandates more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not only nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. We were surprised to find that this place was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. The facility offered fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. It is still important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. The last measure we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We discovered that just 5.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is actually below average.

This nursing home actually received a decent grade in the area of nursing as well. We awarded it a grade of C for that category, which is not a bad score. The nursing score assesses quite a few datapoints, however, the main one is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a lower figure than we were hoping for. Lastly, despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this facility actually performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is typically a reliable indicator that a place has sufficient quality controls in place.

The final category we rated is long-term care. This facility received a bottom of the barrel grade of F in this category. Facilities that don't score well in this category often do not provide as much nursing care and also may be lagging in a few of the areas of routine healthcare services we assessed. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination records. Frankly, we were a bit alarmed this nursing home vaccinated 72.94118 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is quite a few points less than what we were hoping for. To our surprise, this place actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.