Ware Memorial Care Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is it received a very impressive grade in inspections. In fact, inspections ended up being its best category. In this area, we awarded this facility an A. Arguably the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this category typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Unfortunately, we weren't able to track down information on deficiency's for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also want to draw your attention to the fact that this facility received a superb grade of A in our long-term care category. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. On top of providing elite levels of nurse staffing, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. This figure is also far better than the average nursing home. This combination proved to be effective as this nursing home keeps its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.61 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility is also strong in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B+. It outperformed most nursing homes in this category. Our nursing rating consists of several datapoints, but the paramount consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility offers extremely high levels of nursing care, averaging 5.5 hours per resident on a daily basis. This is more nursing care than nearly any other place provides. Lastly, this nursing home also performed well in several of the quality-based metrics we assessed. By way of illustration, in terms of the number of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, this nursing home performed better than the national average. This is generally an indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented with better nursing care and having a policy of regularly turning residents to avoid bed sores.

The next category we assessed was short-term care. This facility was given a strong short-term care rating in our assessment, with a grade of B-. Even though this is not as elite as a few of its other grades, this is nevertheless an acceptable rating for this category. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to grade a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have highly rated rehabilitation services, facilities generally must provide better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below the national average.