West Meade Place

This facility earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its excellent government inspection reports in recent years. We awarded them an A in this category. Our inspection ratings are tied to many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this area have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this place had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

We also gave this nursing home a strong grade in long-term care. This nursing home received a grade of B in this category, which turns out to be one of our better grades. For prospective residents looking for a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are an important measure. This facility's vaccination data weren't as favorable some of its other statistics in this area, such as its number of nursing hours per resident. This facility gave the pneumonia vaccine to just 85.60311 percent of its patients. We'd like to see some improvement in this area in the future. Fortunately, this facility excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Although it had 2.87 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, its risk adjusted metric was better than most nursing homes due to it having some more complex patients.

The third area we graded is short-term care, where this facility was given a grade of B- in this category. In determining these short-term care scores, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our objective is to create a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. One of this nursing home's strength is that it offers more hours of physical therapy per week to its residents. Lastly, we considered the number of patients that were able to return home from this facility. On top of performing well in the area of physical therapy hours, we found that it also fared well in this metric with 62.3 percent of its patients returning home. Most nursing homes are below 50 percent in this statistic.

The next area we rated was nursing, which turned out to be this nursing home's weakest category. We gave this facility a grade of D in that area. Sadly, this grade hurt the nursing home's overall grade a bit. Our nursing rating is based on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the amount of time spent with residents. In this nursing home's case, quantity of care does not appear to be the problem. According to its CMS reports, this nursing home provided an average of 4.7 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis, which was above the national average. Despite performing well in terms of nursing hours, this nursing home was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of residents sustaining pressure ulcers and found that this place was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. Unfortunately, this statistic pulled down this nursing home's nursing grade substantially.