Atrium Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing

To go along with its relatively modest overall score, we gave this nursing home an A+ for its inspection grade. This grade is far more impressive than its overall score. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

This facility also was given a favorable score in our long-term care category. We gave this nursing home an above average grade of B+ in this area. For long-term care residents, the primary goal is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 64.24135 percent of its residents for pneumonia, which is a bit less than we expected but still a decent percentage. Although its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next area we looked at was nursing, where we gave this facility an F. This was definitely one of this facility's major weaknesses. When calculating a facility's nursing grade, we weigh the amount of time nurses are caring for patients and the level of licensure of the nurses. This facility provided a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This figure is well below average. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in computing our nursing ratings. This nursing home performed well in the area of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be measures of the quality of nursing care.

This nursing home's weakest area was short-term care, which is the last category we scored. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this area. Even with several respectable grades in other areas, this grade is still concerning so we felt obligated to draw your attention to it. In determining our short-term care ratings, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The purpose is to formulate a barometer for comparing the rehabilitation services of nursing homes. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 3.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.