Stratford Healthcare Center

This nursing home earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its excellent health inspections in recent years. We gave them an A in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some can be quite insignificant. This nursing home received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This indicates that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies to cause an immediate threat to patient safety or health. A couple of minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This facility was awarded its next best category score in the area of long-term care. We awarded this nursing home a grade of C in this category, which is a respectable score. Our long-term care grades are based in part on the facility's quantity of nursing care. This means a vast spectrum of personal care services, ranging from help with activities of daily living to routine medical services. One of the criteria we considered after nursing hours was vaccines. Thankfully, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Lastly, this place was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home in any area came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of C. The nursing grade is based on quite a few subcategories, but the paramount consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day, which is well below average. Finally, nursing ratings also consider quality-based measures, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is often an indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses aids to assist its residents.

The last category we rated is short-term care. This nursing home was given a C for the category. In our short-term care score, we attempt to create a valuable barometer for rehabilitation. In doing so, we analyze a nursing home's levels of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per patient than the typical facility. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 4.2 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below average.