Berkshire Health Care Center

On top of receiving a great overall grade, this facility also received top notch health inspections in recent years. We awarded it one of our higher scores in that area, with an A. Perhaps the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

An additional quality feature for this facility is that it was given an impressive long-term care score. In fact, this proved to be its second best category score. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B+. When facilities receive this kind of grade in long-term care it is usually a good sign for patient care and suggests that the place is well-staffed with nurses aids. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours is vaccinations. This nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 97.64151 percent of its patients. This is a great way to minimize negative health outcomes for the elderly population. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility's next best category was its nursing grade, where it received a grade of B-. While this didn't quite match its scores in some of the categories discussed above, this is still a decent score. Our nursing score is based on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of licensure of the nurses as well as the amount of time spent with patients. This nursing home averages just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low figure. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures. Although this facility got docked a bit for nursing hours, it actually excelled in some of these quality-based metrics. With less than five percent of its residents experiencing pressure ulcers, it did very well in this subcategory. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as having a system of moving a resident more often.

Turning to our last area, this nursing home received a C in short-term care, which we consider to be an acceptable grade. In computing our short-term care scores, we analyze the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. This area is often a reliable assessment of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. It doesn't look like this nursing home submitted data regarding its registered nurse or physical therapy staffing. The final datapoint we considered in this area is the number 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 residents were able to return home, which is below average.