Complete Care at Berkshire

While we did not have many positive things to say about this place's overall score, it did receive a respectable government inspection report this year. As a result, it received a decent grade in this area with a B-. Our inspection ratings are tied to datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key item to look for on these reports. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to the well being of residents. This place was assessed 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to pose an immediate threat to patient safety or health. Finally, CMS cited this nursing home for possible abuse or neglect. Hopefully, its performance improves in the future, but until then we simply can't recommend this facility.

This nursing home actually received a decent grade in the area of nursing as well. We awarded it a grade of B- for that category, which is not a bad score. Our nursing rating is primarily tied to a facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility actually excelled in some of the quality measures we looked at. In fact, it scored well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these areas to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the quantity of hours of care offered.

We also gave this nursing home a middle of the road grade in the category of long-term care, where we awarded it a B-. If you are seeking anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care grades. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. We were pleased to discover that this nursing home vaccinated 98.6911 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Finally, this nursing home was also able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Turning to the final category, this facility received a grade of C for short-term care, which is generally a respectable score. In forming these short-term care scores, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The goal is to formulate a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Unfortunately, this place was below average in terms of its quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the metrics we assessed. The question is whether this also affected quality of care. The final statistic we assessed in this category is the percentage of residents that returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 5.4 percent of this facility's residents returned home. This figure was below the national average.