The Forum at Memorial Woods Healthcare Center

In addition to receiving a great overall grade, this nursing home received an A+ for nursing. When determining our nursing ratings, we assess both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of those nurses. This particular nursing home provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a policy of moving residents at least once a day.

We also gave this nursing home a grade of A+ for its long-term care grade. When nursing homes receive this type of score in this category it is usually a good sign for patient care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the factors we considered in addition to nursing hours was vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a reliable method to avoid negative health outcomes for the senior population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This nursing home also was given an A+ for its short-term care score. Our short-term care ratings are vital for residents in need of rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a broad range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last statistic we assessed in this area is the number of patients that eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that 7 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Turning to our inspection category, this nursing home excelled in that area, which is based on the facility's recent government inspections. We gave it an elite grade of A- for that category. This finished off this place's straight A report card. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with better grades in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.