Berry Hill Nursing Home

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received a very impressive nursing grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A-. We assessed the skill-level of nurses employed by the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time those nurses were with patients, in computing our rating in this area. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

This nursing home also was awarded a strong short-term care score. In fact, we awarded it an above average grade of B+ in this area. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to gauge a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. To offer good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must offer better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents that were able to return home from the facility. We found that 6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This nursing home is also above average in the area of long-term care, where it received a grade of B. It performed more favorably than most facilities in this area. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 99.431816 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is significantly higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Finally, we also found that this facility has received favorable government inspections in recent years. In fact, we gave it a B in this category. Inspection scores are tied to many pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that receive favorable grades in this area typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This facility was assessed 7 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This means that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to be an immediate risk to patient health or safety. The fact that the deficiencies were relatively minor made us feel better about this inspection report.