Berkshire Place

In addition to being a first rate nursing home overall, this facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received an A. We assessed the skill-level of nurses employed by the nursing home, in addition to the number of hours the nurses were with patients, in calculating our grade in this category. This nursing home averages 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 facility performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Adding to its top-shelf profile, this facility also performed well in our short-term care category. In fact, we awarded it a score of A for that category. Our short-term care grades are arguably more critical for folks in need of rehabilitation services. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing services. This includes not merely nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.9 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

We gave this nursing home an A for inspections. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing our inspection grades. One of those factors is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies are relatively minor. This facility was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies to be an imminent risk to resident safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

The next category we looked at was long-term care, where this facility received a grade of B. Even though this wound up being its lowest category rating, this is nevertheless an above average grade. For residents seeking a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. Once we assessed the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 90.666664 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which happens to be a few points lower than we were hoping for but still a respectable percentage. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.