Berlin Health & Rehab Center

Although we did not rate this facility well overall, we want to point out its decent grade of B- in the category of short-term care. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to judge a facility's rehabilitation services. To offer highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer better levels of highly skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This nursing home provides more services with physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we looked at. This is usually a favorable sign. Finally, we considered the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.1 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of C. Our nursing rating assesses the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We consider both the levels of training of the nurses and the quantity of hours spent with residents. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Finally, nursing ratings also consider quality-based assessments, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours, this facility performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is often a reliable indicator that a nursing home has sufficient quality controls in place. Many falls can be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

This nursing home's second worse score is long-term care, where it earned just a D in that category. This is a well below average grade. When facilities receive this type of grade in long-term care it is typically a bad sign for patient care and it may indicate that the place is not as well-staffed. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination statistics. We were concerned by the fact that this nursing home vaccinated just 85.23985 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this nursing home was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had less hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This was its best feature in this category.

The last category we looked at is inspections. This ended up being this facility's weakest link. We gave it a grade of just D in this category. Since this information is collected by independent government inspectors, we weight it heavily in our overall grade. Our inspection grades factor in many items found on the facility's inspection reports. If you see too many deficiencies on the reports, this is generally a bad sign. Severe deficiencies indicate a risk to resident safety. This nursing home was assessed 4 deficiencies on its inspection report. The only positive thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they created a risk to resident health or safety. Lastly, we also would like to point out that this nursing home received large government fines amounting to over $100,000. This usually indicates that a bad performance spanned more than one year.