Strafford Care Center

To pair with its strong overall score, we gave this nursing home an A+ for our inspections rating. Our inspection grades account for a host of factors included in a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we look at is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better scores in this area usually have very few of these severe deficiencies. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

This nursing home truly excelled in the category of short-term care, where we awarded it a score of A-. Not many facilities performed more favorably in this category. Short-term care ratings are vital for prospective residents seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes higher levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a wide scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. One reason for this facility's strong score in this category is that it provides more care with registered nurses to its residents than the average nursing home. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return home from this nursing home. It outperformed the vast majority of nursing homes in the country with 67 percent of its residents returning home.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. The nursing grade includes a handful of datapoints, many of which are based on nursing hours. This nursing home provides 2.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We look at these areas as reliable indicators of the caliber of nursing care being provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The final category we scored is long-term care. We gave it an abysmal F for this category, which is a very poor grade. You should not simply rule out a facility because of one terrible category though. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it generally means the nursing home didn't perform well in our measures relating to resident care. Once we looked at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. We were concerned by the fact that this nursing home vaccinated just 79.695435 percent of its residents for pneumonia. To our surprise, this place actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.19 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.