Berkeley Square Retirement Center

On top of faring well overall, this facility earned nearly flawless government inspections. Therefore, it earned one of our highest scores in that category with an A+. Arguably the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that CMS did not 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.

This facility also was dominant in the area of long-term care, where we gave it a score of A. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. Facilities that excel in this category typically provide residents with better supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its residents, which is very impressive. Pneumonia tragically can be a life or death ailment for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility does not take any chances. Clearly, this facility 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 nursing home also received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. In computing a facility's nursing score, we assess the amount of time nurses spend with residents and the levels of training of those nurses. This facility provided 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

In the final category we scored, this nursing home was awarded a very favorable grade of A- in our short-term care category. With this grade, the facility topped off a straight A report card. In calculating our short-term care scores, we size up a nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This score is more often than not a reliable measure of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 4.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.