Waterville Residential Care Center

While we were not high on this nursing home's overall score, it received a very impressive inspection report this year. In fact, it received an excellent inspection report this year. As a result, it earned one of our highest grades in that category with an A. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is arguably more important than the number of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively minor. This facility was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This means that the inspectors didn't deem any of these deficiencies to create an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

Among this facility's host of rock-bottom grades was its F in the area of short-term care. Our short-term care grade is often used to score a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To have quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. Based on its score in this category, we weren't stunned to discover that this facility was well below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the figures we assessed. Frankly, this was what we expected to find. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 3.7 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Another concern was the F this nursing home was given in the category of long-term care. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means the facility did not perform well in our quality measures relating to patient care. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination data. Candidly, we were a bit alarmed this nursing home vaccinated 53.59477 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which happens to be quite a few points less than what we were hoping for. To our surprise, this place was actually decent at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.

The next category we rated is nursing. We gave it a lowly F in this area, which is a rock bottom grade. Our nursing score assesses many subcategories, most of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. To pair with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this place also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and major falls. This nursing home had more falls and pressure ulcers than the average nursing home. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, these metrics hurt this facility's nursing grade quite a bit.