Barron Center

In addition to earning a strong overall score, this facility performed well in inspections, which is based on the facility's inspection reports. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A for that area. Inspection grades weigh a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we consider is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with better scores in this category tend to have few of these severe deficiencies. This nursing home received 7 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. The nursing grade assesses many datapoints, however, the paramount consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This nursing home also was strong in the category of short-term care, where we awarded it a score of A-. Few nursing homes fared better in this area. Our short-term care scores are critical for individuals requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a wide spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

Turning to the fourth area, this nursing home was given a very strong long-term care grade. We awarded it a grade of B+ in this category, topping off one of our more favorable profiles. For prospective residents in need of a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. After considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 79.002625 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is somewhat lower than we were hoping for but still a decent figure. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.