Berry Hill Nursing Home

Berry Hill Nursing Home is located in South Boston, Virginia. With an overall score of D, this is a well below average nursing home. This nursing home has very little going for it. The best thing we can really say about this place is that it did not receive any F's in in any of the major categories. More information about its category grades is available below.

While we did not rate this nursing home favorably overall, we want to point out its relatively solid health inspections in recent years. We gave it a B+ in this category, which was much better than its overall score. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection scores. One critical factor is health deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some deficiencies can be quite minor. While this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

This nursing home was given its next highest category score in the area of short-term care. We awarded this nursing home a grade of C in this category, which is a decent score. In forming our short-term care ratings, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, speech therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. Our objective is to devise a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of various nursing homes. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. Lastly, we assessed the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. In fact, we found that it outperformed the majority of facilities in the country with 51.5 percent of its residents returning home. This is a higher rate than most facilities.

This nursing home's second least favorable score is long-term care, where it earned a grade of just D in that area. This is a well below average score. If you are seeking services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care grades. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. We were pleased to find that this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. To our surprise, this nursing home was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 1.42 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

The next category we scored is nursing, which ended up being this facility's worst category. We gave this nursing home a D in this area. Our nursing score looks at the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the number of hours spent with patients. This facility averaged a meager 3.1 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is an alarmingly low total. Unfortunately, this facility also had terrible scores in some of the quality-based measures to go along with its weak nursing hour totals. We looked at the percentage of residents suffering pressure ulcers and we were disappointed. This nursing home was at roughly 1.5 times the national average in this statistic. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many pressure ulcers could be avoided with better nursing care. This statistic helped pull down this nursing home's nursing rating quite a bit.