Belaire Health Care Center

While this nursing home's overall grade was not a highlight, it actually excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it an A- for that category, which is one of our best scores. Our inspection grades weigh several factors found on a facility's inspection report. One of the most important criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. You should avoid facilities with a list of deficiencies flagged. While this place had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This means that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

This facility's second best category was nursing, but even there it received a grade of just D. This is still a well below average grade. Our nursing rating is based on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home offered only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home fared well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these statistics to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Unfortunately, this facility's next best category is short-term care. However, with a D in this area, it still fared relatively poorly. Our short-term care ratings are thought to be most critical for residents requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation typically utilizes more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not just nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides substantially less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than a typical nursing home. The final statistic we assessed in this category is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.8 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics was damning for this nursing home's short-term care grade.

The next category we looked at was long-term care, where this facility was given a rock bottom grade in this area also. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this area, which is definitely somewhat alarming. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination data. Candidly, we were a bit alarmed this nursing home vaccinated 65.56291 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is several points lower than average. Surprisingly, this place was actually decent at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best feature in this category.