Bernice Nursing and Rehabilitation Center

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this facility also excelled in the area of inspections, where it received an A-. Few facilities performed better in this category. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Fortunately, although this place had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

This facility's next best area is its long-term care score, where it was given a B-. For residents in need of a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 90.93567 percent of its residents. This is somewhat lower than we anticipated but still a respectable percentage. On a more positive note, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home in any area came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of C. Our nursing score assesses a handful of subcategories, many of which are associated with nursing hours. This nursing home provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily. This is a relatively low total compared to most other nursing homes. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this place performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is typically an indicator that a place has quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a nursing home provides enough nurses aids to assist its residents.

Turning to our last category, this facility did not perform well. Due to a bottom of the barrel grade of F in short-term care, this is this facility's weakest category grade. Short-term care grades are generally employed to score a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To provide quality rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must have better levels of highly skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The final datapoint we considered 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 residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics doomed this nursing home's short-term care grade.