Belmont Lodge Health Care Center

Although this place's overall grade was not a highlight, it did receive a very good grade in the area of inspections. In fact, we gave it a B+ for that category, which is one of our better scores. Our inspection grades account for a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. You generally want to avoid places with a bunch of deficiencies flagged. This nursing home was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered severe. This tells you that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies an immediate risk to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

This nursing home actually received a decent grade in the area of nursing as well. We awarded it a grade of C for that category, which is not a bad score. Our nursing score is mostly associated with a facility's level 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. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home actually excelled in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. In fact, it performed well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is just as important as the number of hours of care offered.

We gave this nursing home a grade of just D for our short-term care grade. This is not an impressive grade. Short-term care grades are commonly used to assess a nursing home's rehabilitation services In order to have good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer better levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Based on its score in this category, we weren't surprised to find that this place was well below average in terms of its number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its patients based on the metrics we assessed. Honestly, this was about what we expected here. The last metric we considered in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics doomed this facility's short-term care grade.

Moving on to our last area, this facility really did not perform very well in this category either. With a bottom of the barrel grade of F in long-term care, this is about as bad as it gets. When facilities receive this type of score in long-term care it is a bad sign for patient care and it may mean that the nursing home is not as well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Frankly, we were a bit bothered by the fact that this nursing home vaccinated just 88.37209 percent of its residents. Surprisingly, this facility actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This was its best score in this category.