Bartow Center

While we were fairly low on this nursing home overall, we awarded it an A for our inspections rating. This score is significantly more impressive than the facility's overall grade. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection grades. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite insignificant. Although this facility had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. A couple minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

We also awarded this nursing home a respectable grade in the category of short-term care, where it received a grade of C. Our short-term care grade is commonly employed to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide higher levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. We were surprised to find that this facility was below average in the two key staffing areas we focus on. In fact, it supplied fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other nursing homes. It is important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.

This facility's next best category was nursing, but even there it received a grade of just D. This is still a well below average grade. Our nursing score analyzes the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of skill of those nurses as well as the amount of time spent with residents. This particular facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This figure is far below the national average. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing scores. This nursing home performed well when it comes to minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The final category we assessed is long-term care, where this nursing home received a very poor score in this category also. Sadly, it received an abysmal F for this area, which is obviously very concerning. For long-term care residents, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Fortunately, this facility gave the vaccine to 99.71591 percent of its residents, which is a very solid datapoint. Surprisingly, this nursing home also keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.