Trend Health & Rehab of Meridian

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. We were not able to locate deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home fared well in our long-term care category. Indeed, we gave it a score of A- for that area, which turns out to be one of our most favorable scores. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 74.74227 percent of its patients. This is a bit below what we were hoping for but still a reasonably acceptable figure. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, at least this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of C in this category. While this wasn't quite as good as some of its other category grades, this isn't a bad score either. Nursing grades are largely tied to a facility's level of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, while this facility got docked a bit for nursing hours, it actually excelled in a few of our quality-based measures. With less than five percent of its patients sustaining pressure ulcers, it fared remarkably well in this metric.

The next category we assessed is short-term care, where this nursing home received a grade of C. This actually ended up being this facility's least impressive category. This is nevertheless a middle of the pack score. In determining our short-term care grades, we look at the facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. This grade is typically a useful assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final item we looked at in this category is the number of residents that returned home from the facility. We found that just 4.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.