Bertram Nursing and Rehab Center

On top of being a strong facility overall, this facility especially excelled in our inspections category, where it received a grade of A-. Few facilities performed better in this category. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher grades in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Amazingly, this was one of the few nursing homes in the country that had no deficiencies whatsoever on its inspection report. This is very impressive. This is really what you want to see in this important metric.

This nursing home is also above average in the area of short-term care, where it received a score of B. It outperformed most nursing homes in this area. Our short-term care ratings are based in part on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This includes a broad scope of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, not to mention other types of therapy. Unfortunately, it does not look like this facility submitted registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. The last metric we looked at in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We discovered that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

The third area we assessed is long-term care. In that area, we awarded this nursing home a decent grade of B-. In a long-term care setting, the primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. One of the criteria we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours is vaccinations. Fortunately, this nursing home provided the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Finally, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The final area we assessed is nursing. We gave it a B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this area. The nursing grade weighs several subcategories, many of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. This facility provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality measures. Although this nursing home got docked a bit for its nursing hours, it excelled in some of these quality metrics. With fewer than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it did very well in this statistic. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a policy of moving a patient even once per day.