Berkeley Springs Center

Berkeley Springs Center is one of just a couple available nursing homes in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. This nursing home was awarded an overall grade of B, which is a very respectable grade. In our view, this facility looks like a good fit for quite a few people. This nursing home's strong profile was highlighted by its inspection grade, which is addressed in the next section.

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our inspections rating. Inspection ratings are tied to items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so favorably is that it was awarded a strong long-term care grade. In fact, long-term care ended up being its second highest category score. In that category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A-. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a great way to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations for the aged 65 and up population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.13 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B. The nursing rating includes a number of subcategories. The most important factor is the number of hours nurses spent with residents. This nursing home provides 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving patients even once per day.

The last category we assessed was short-term care. This facility was awarded a grade of B- in the category. In determining our short-term care grades, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The purpose is to create a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. This nursing home employs both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities employ these skilled professionals. Finally, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. It performed decently in this area, with 48 percent of its patients returning home.