Amherst Manor Skilled Nursing

To go along with its relatively modest overall grade, we awarded this nursing home an A for its inspection grade. This score is far more impressive than its overall rating. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection grades. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of the deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some can be relatively insignificant. This place was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This means that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies to be an immediate risk to resident health or safety. A couple of minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

Another one of this nursing home's more favorable category scores was in the area of short-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a B+. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we size up the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This score is considered to be a fair measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return home. We found that 5.7 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Our third category we graded was long-term care, in which this facility was given an F. For patients looking for a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are very important. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.

The next category we scored is nursing, which was this nursing home's weakest area. Sadly, it received an F in this category, which is clearly concerning. Our nursing rating is based on the facility's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with patients. This facility averaged a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is an alarmingly low total. In addition to performing badly in terms of nursing hours, this facility also had rock bottom marks in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing grades. For starters, we looked at the percent of residents experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This place was at more than double the national average in both of these statistics. This is quite alarming when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This ended up sealing this facility's fate of receiving a poor nursing grade.