The Madison on Marsh

While this nursing home's overall grade was decent, it really excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that category, which is one of our highest scores. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple of minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This facility's next highest category is its long-term care score, where it was awarded a C. With our long-term care assessment, we weigh the volume of care offered by a nursing home, along with some qualitative measures. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. Fortunately, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. This place was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The third most favorable category we awarded this facility in any category came in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a grade of C. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This grade is more often than not a solid measure of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. We were surprised to find that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. The facility provided fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. It is important to determine whether this is adversely impacting the quality of care. The final metric we assessed in this category is the percentage of patients who returned home from the facility. We found that just 5.1 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. This figure was below the national average.

Moving on to the fourth area, we gave this nursing home a grade of D in nursing. This is the facility's weakest category grade. The nursing rating analyzes a handful of subcategories, however, the main consideration is the number of nurse hours spent with patients. This particular nursing home averaged just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This number is well below the national average. Finally, we also looked at some quality measures in calculating our nursing ratings. This place was above average in two of the major statistics we considered, with solid marks for avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. These statistics are usually reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care offered.