Berkshire Health Care Center

To pair with its relatively modest overall score, we gave this facility an A for its inspection grade. This grade is far more impressive than the facility's overall rating. Arguably the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this place had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

This facility also was given a strong long-term care score. Indeed, we gave it a grade of B+ in that category, which happens to be one of our more favorable scores. Long-term care grades in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. One of the datapoints we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. This nursing home administered the pneumonia vaccine to 97.63033 percent of its patients. This is a great way to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the senior population. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

As it turns out, this nursing home only received a D for its short-term care score, which is not one of our better scores. Short-term care grades are commonly used to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services In order to offer highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Given its poor grade, we were not shocked to find that this nursing home provided substantially fewer registered nurse hours per resident than most other facilities. The last item we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. This statistic was damning for this facility's short-term care grade.

The next category we graded was nursing, turned out to be this facility's worst area. We gave this facility a D in this category. Our nursing rating analyzes the facility's level of nurse staffing. We weigh both the levels of licensure of the nurses and the amount of time spent with patients. This nursing home offered just 2.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing scores. This nursing home fared well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these metrics to be measures of the quality of nursing care.