Beacon Health Center

While we graded this nursing home incredibly poorly overall, it received a decent short-term care score this year. We gave it a C in that area. Our short-term care ratings are considered to be more meaningful for individuals needing rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing services. This includes not only nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. We were surprised to find that this place was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. In fact, it supplied fewer physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. It is important to determine whether this also correlates to a lower quality of care. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents 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 residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing rating. In that category, we awarded this facility an D. Nursing grades are based largely on levels of nurse staffing. 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. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing ratings. This place performed well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers.

Among this place's alarming category grades was a lowly F for its inspection rating. Typically, this indicates we found some red flags on the facility's inspections. With places that received this bad of an inspection score, we would scrutinize the severe deficiencies on its inspection report. This particular facility was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only positive thing we can say is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they created a threat to resident safety or health. Finally, we want to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home was assessed significant government fines amounting to more than $100,000. This typically indicates that a facility's poor performance spanned multiple years.

Moving on to our final category, this facility didn't fare very well in this category either. Due to a very poor grade of F in long-term care, this is just about as bad as it gets. In a long-term care setting, the 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 residents. After considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination records. We were optimistic to learn that this facility vaccinated 98.49397 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.