Bennington Health & Rehab

The main reason this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an elite nursing grade. In fact, we gave this facility a grade of A. Our nursing score is based on a host of subcategories. The most heavily weighted factor is the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This nursing home also excelled in the area of short-term care. For this reason, we awarded it a score of A- for that area, which happens to be one of our highest scores. Short-term care grades are generally used to assess a facility's rehabilitation services. To have high-end rehabilitation services, facilities generally must offer higher levels of skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 5.9 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

The third area we analyzed was long-term care. This nursing home's received a bottom of the barrel long-term care grade where it received an F. When facilities receive a score in this range in this category it generally means the facility didn't perform well in our measures relating to resident care. After assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. We were a bit alarmed this nursing home vaccinated 89.01734 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which happens to be quite a bit less than what we expected. Surprisingly, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.

In the last category of inspections, this facility did not fare well. It received an F in our inspection category. This ended up really pulling this facility's overall grade down as we heavily weight this category. For places with poor inspection grades, you should really scrutinize any severe deficiencies found on their inspection reports. This nursing home had 3 deficiencies by CMS. The only positive thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that indicate they caused a threat to patient safety or health. Lastly, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this nursing home received significant government fines in recent years of over $50,000. This generally suggests that inspectors became fed up after multiple years of bad government inspections.