The Meridian

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Nursing ratings are largely tied to the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures 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 place the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning a patient even once per day.

Adding to its top-shelf resume, this facility also excelled in our short-term care category. In fact, it received a grade of A for the category. In the area of short-term care, we seek to qualify indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We look at a nursing home's skilled nursing services, including the ones performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 6.4 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

This nursing home has had near flawless inspections in recent years. We gave them an A- in this area. Inspection grades account for a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with better grades in this category typically have very few of these severe deficiencies. This place was hit with 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to be an imminent risk to patient safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

Switching gears to the final area, this facility received an extremely favorable long-term care rating. While this isn't as impressive as many of its other grades, this is still one of the stronger grades we offer. When nursing homes receive this type of score in long-term care it is usually a good sign for resident care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the data points we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccines. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccination to 96.62162 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a reliable method to avoid unnecessary deaths for the aged 65 and up population. Finally, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.