Essex Meadows Five-Star Rating for the Sixth Consecutive Year

Essex Meadows Health Center has earned a full 5-star rating for 6^th Consecutive year with the Center for Medicare Services (CMS) Five-Star Quality Rating System

In 2009, CMS created the Five-Star Quality Rating System to help consumers, their families, and caregivers compare nursing homes more easily and to help identify areas about which they may evaluate quality of care and services delivered to residents. For the sixth consecutive year, Essex Meadows Health Center has earned five full stars in all areas evaluated by CMS.

The Nursing Home Compare website features a quality rating system that gives each nursing home a rating between one and five stars. Nursing homes with five stars are considered to have quality much above average, and nursing homes with one star are considered to have quality much below average. There is one overall 5-star rating for each nursing home, and a separate rating for each of the following three sources of information.

• Health Inspections — The health inspection rating contains information from the last three years of onsite inspections, including both standard surveys and any complaint surveys. This information is gathered by trained, objective inspectors who go onsite to the nursing home and follow a specific process to determine the extent to which a nursing home has met Medicaid and Medicare’s minimum quality requirements. The most recent survey findings are weighted more than the prior two years. More than 180,000 onsite reviews are used in the health inspection scoring nationally.
• Staffing — The staffing rating has information about the number of hours of care provided on average to each resident each day by nursing staff. This rating considers differences in the levels of resident care need in each nursing home. For example, a nursing home with residents who had more severe needs would be expected to have more nursing staff than a nursing home where the resident needs were not as high. Nursing homes must earn a 4-star rating on either the RN or Total Staffing rating to achieve an overall Staffing rating of four stars.
• Quality Measures (QMs) — The quality measure rating has information on 11 different physical and clinical measures for nursing home residents. The rating now includes information about a nursing home’s use of antipsychotic medications in both long-stay and short-stay residents. This information is collected by the nursing home for all residents. The QMs offer information about how well nursing homes are caring for their residents’ physical and clinical needs. More than 12 million assessments of the conditions of nursing home residents are used in the Five-Star rating system.

Please follow the link to view Essex Meadows’ Medicare rating.

You may also view our rating with US News and World Report

To view a video about how to select a nursing home for a loved one, please view the following three minute video.