The Stratford House

Although we didn't give this nursing home a good overall score, we did give it a strong grade in the category of inspections, where it earned a B+. Inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

This facilities next most favorable category is short-term care. We awarded it a grade of B- in this area. This is basically a slightly below average score in this area. In forming these short-term care grades, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The purpose is to create a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Unfortunately, this place was below average in terms of its number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. The important question is whether this also affected quality of care. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents that were able to return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home. This figure was actually well below average.

We awarded this nursing home a grade of just D for our long-term care score. This is not an impressive grade. Nursing homes that do not score well in this category often do not provide as much nursing care and also may be struggling in a few of the areas of routine medical care we looked at. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccines. Candidly, we were a bit alarmed this facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to just 73.571434 percent of its residents. Surprisingly, this nursing home actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.

The last category we assessed is nursing, in which this facility was given a very poor grade here as well. We gave it an abysmal F for this area, which is definitely very concerning. Our nursing grade focuses on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We consider both the levels of skill of the nurses and the number of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing scores. This nursing home fared well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these data points to be measures of the quality of nursing care.