Berkeley Springs Center

To go along with its decent overall score, we gave this nursing home an A- for its inspection grade. This is far better than its overall score. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite minor. While this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

In addition, we awarded this nursing home a B+ in our long-term care category. This happens to be one of our better grades. Facilities that do well in this category typically provide residents with more supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 99.68355 percent of its residents, which is more than most nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

This facility also earned a strong nursing grade. In fact, we awarded it an above average grade of F in this area. Our nursing rating focuses on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We weigh both the levels of skill of those nurses as well as the quantity of hours spent with residents. This nursing home provides 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is slightly below average. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this place also didn't fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility.

This facility's worst area was short-term care, which is the final area we looked at. Sadly, it received a lowly F in this category. In spite of some decent grades in other areas, this grade is nevertheless alarming so we felt obligated to make a note of it. In our short-term care grade, we attempt to create a meaningful measure for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we look at a facility's scope of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. As you might expect, we discovered that this place offers far less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per patient than the typical facility. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 47.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics was damning for this nursing home's short-term care grade.