Stratford Healthcare Center

Stratford Healthcare Center is one of four facilities located in Danville, Virginia. We awarded it an overall grade of C, which is a middle of the pack rating. Based on the data we reviewed, there are definitely much worse nursing homes out there. One of the best aspects of this nursing home's profile is its exemplary inspection reports, which is addressed in the next section.

We want to draw your attention to the fact that this facility really outperformed its overall grade in the category of inspections. In fact, it received an excellent inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best grades in that category with a grade of A. Our inspection scores are tied to many datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this category typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This nursing home was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to create an imminent risk to resident health or safety. A few minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

We also awarded this nursing home a decent score in the area of short-term care, where we gave it a B-. In calculating our short-term care grades, we quantify the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our purpose is to formulate a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. One reason for this nursing home's strong score in this category is that it provides a substantially greater volume of physical therapist hours than a typical nursing home. The last measure we looked at in this category is the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that it fared better than most nursing homes in this area with 50.7 percent of its patients returning home.

This facilities third best area is long-term care. We gave it a B- in this category. This is essentially a slightly below average grade in this area. Our long-term care scores are based in part on a nursing home's volume of nursing care. This includes a vast scope of personal care services, ranging from assistance with activities of daily living to routine healthcare services. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is higher than most nursing homes. Finally, we looked at its number of hospitalizations. Here we found that this place had 3.22 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Although this figure is somewhat concerning, this number can be skewed for some facilities due to the medical complexity of patients.

This facility's least impressive area is nursing, which is the final area we scored. We gave it an F in this area. Despite a few solid grades in other categories, this score is nevertheless of a concern so we wanted to point it out. Our nursing rating includes a handful of data points, most of which are associated with quantities of nurse staffing. With only 3 hours of nursing care per patient daily, this facility's nurse staffing levels were significantly below the national average. In addition to receiving below average marks for nursing hours, this place was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in determining our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing pressure ulcers and found that this nursing home was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this metric.