Bethany Village Retirement Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it received an A+ inspection grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical category. Inspection scores are based on many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this category typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Although this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also fared very well in the area of short-term care, where we awarded it a score of A-. Only a select group of nursing homes fared better in this area. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to grade a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to provide good rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last item we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Turning to the next category, this nursing home also received a grade of B+ for its long-term care rating. This is an above average score in this category. Nursing homes that do well in this category typically provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. Once we concluded our assessment of the volume of care provided by nurses, we next considered the facility's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is very impressive. Pneumonia tragically can be a life or death health condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility doesn't leave this to chance. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The last category we assessed is nursing. This nursing home was awarded a strong nursing rating this year, with a B-. While this was not as impressive as a few of its other grades, this is nevertheless a decent grade in that area. The nursing score considers a number of data points. The most important factor is the number of hours nurses spend with residents. This nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is a low total compared to most other nursing homes. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this nursing home actually fared better in some of the quality measures we looked at. In fact, it scored well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the quantity of hours of care offered.