Bethany on the Lake

We also found that this facility excelled in our short-term care rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. In calculating our short-term care scores, we size up a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other licensed professionals. This area is more often than not a useful assessment of the nursing home's rehabilitation. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6.9 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This facility also received a virtually flawless government inspection. As a result, it received one of our highest grades in that category with an A+. This was one of the few facilities to receive multiple A+'s. Our inspection grades are tied to several items found on the a nursing home's recent government inspections. Places that score well in this area have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was awarded a strong long-term care grade. In fact, this is this nursing home's third most impressive category score. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of A. When facilities receive this kind of score in long-term care it is a good sign for resident care and suggests that the nursing home is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the criteria we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. Vaccination is a proven method to minimize unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the elderly population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The final category we assessed is nursing, where this nursing home was awarded a grade of A. This topped off a very impressive report card. Only a select few facilities received an A- or higher in all four categories. Nursing scores are heavily correlated with quantity of nursing care available. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.