Barre Gardens Nursing and Rehab

The main reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it earned an excellent inspection grade. In fact, its inspection grade was far better than its overall score. In the inspections category, we gave this facility an A-. Our inspection grades weigh several factors included in a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher scores in this area usually have few of these severe deficiencies. This facility received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that CMS did not deem any of these deficiencies an immediate risk to resident safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

We also awarded this nursing home a decent grade in the category of short-term care, with a grade of C. Short-term care grades are meaningful for patients requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional skilled nursing. This means a vast scope of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. We found that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. In fact, it supplied fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other facilities. It is still important to determine whether this is adversely impacting the quality of care. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients that eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 5.3 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home. This figure was quite a bit below average.

The next area we graded is long-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of C. If you are seeking services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care scores. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. Candidly, we were a bit worried that this facility vaccinated 79.29824 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is quite a few points lower than what we were hoping for. On a more positive note, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The final category we scored is nursing, which turned out to be this facility's worst category. We awarded this facility a grade of D in this category. Our nursing score includes a handful of subcategories, but the most important consideration is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing ratings. This facility performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these metrics to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.