Bel Air Care Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is it received a very impressive grade in inspections. Inspections turned out to be its best category. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of A. Inspection scores are tied to items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this area have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to note the fact that this nursing home was awarded a top-shelf grade of A in our long-term care area. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. Once we finished looking at the quantity of nursing care, we then looked at the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients against pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a dangerous ailment for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a nursing home does not roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B+ for its nursing rating. This is a well above average score in this category. Our nursing score includes several components, but the most important consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well when it comes to avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The next area we assessed is short-term care. We awarded this nursing home a solid grade in that category, with a B-. Although this isn't on par with some of this facility's other grades, it is still a middle of the pack score. In crafting these short-term care ratings, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to create a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. It does not look like this nursing home provided information about its staffing of registered nurses or physical therapists. Finally, we considered the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.