Berkley West Healthcare Center

The primary reason this facility received a decent overall grade is its excellent health inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our better grades in that area, with a grade of A-. This is a much better score than the facility's overall grade, which was decent but certainly not elite. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection ratings. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are quite minor. While this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor dings aren't necessarily the end of the world.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B-. When calculating our nursing scores, we assess both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the skill levels of those nurses. This facility provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is a somewhat discouraging figure which is well below the national average. Finally, our nursing ratings also consider quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically a good indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Some falls can be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses to assist its patients.

We also gave this nursing home a respectable grade in the area of short-term care, where it received a C. In crafting these short-term care ratings, we analyze the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to devise a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we looked at in this category is the percentage of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that just 6 percent of this facility's residents returned home. Unfortunately, this was below the national average.

The next category we looked at is long-term care. We gave it a C in that area. This is a perfectly acceptable grade in this area. In a long-term care environment, the primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Thankfully, this nursing home provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is a very solid percentage. This facility also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.