Balmoral Nursing Home

We want to point out that this nursing home really outperformed its overall grade in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless inspection report this year. As a result, we gave it one of our best scores in that category with an A. Arguably the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this category most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Based on this, we still had favorable view of this facility's recent inspections.

This nursing home's next most favorable category was long-term care. We gave it a grade of B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. In a long-term care setting, the nursing home's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. We discovered that this nursing home administered the vaccine to just 73.14974 percent of its residents, which is somewhat concerning. On a more positive note, 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 figure.

Turning to another strength for this facility, it also received an elite nursing grade. In fact, we gave this nursing home an impressive grade of D. Our nursing rating analyzes the facility's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the number of hours spent with patients. This facility provided just 0.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in calculating our nursing grades. This nursing home fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

Moving on to our final area, we awarded this nursing home a D in our short-term care category. This is the nursing home's worst category score. In our short-term care score, we attempt to craft a fair barometer for rehabilitation services. In this process, we look at a facility's offerings of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as respiratory therapy. Given its grade in this category, we weren't surprised to find that this facility is well below average in terms of the number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the figures we looked at. Honestly, this was about what we expected here. The last statistic we assessed in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics doomed this nursing home's short-term care score.