Barnes Healthcare

This facility earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to emphasize its nearly flawless government inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A- in this category. These inspection ratings take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these factors by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. Nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this facility an B-. Our nursing grade considers a variety of subcategories. The most heavily weighted variable is the number of hours nurses spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home excelled in some of the quality measures we assessed. In fact, it scored well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the quantity of hours of care offered.

This facility received its third highest category score in the area of short-term care. We awarded this facility a grade of B- in this area, which is a reasonably acceptable grade. Short-term care grades are generally employed to judge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation To offer high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. We were not able to locate registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below the national average.

The next category we rated was long-term care. This facility received a B- for this category. In calculating our long-term care scores, we analyze the assistance with daily living offered to the facility's residents. After looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the facility's vaccination record. This nursing home vaccinated 92.62673 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is a few points lower than we anticipated but still a reasonably acceptable percentage. Nevertheless, this facility excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.