Bethel Home

One of the reasons this ended up being a great nursing home is that it received an impressive inspection grade. Inspections ended up being its best category. In that area, we awarded this nursing home an A. Our inspection scores are tied to pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this area typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This means the inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor dings are not necessarily something to panic about.

We also wanted to point out the fact that this facility was given a top-shelf grade of A in our short-term care area. In the area of short-term care, we try to assess measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We look at the facility's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data 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 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A-. Nursing ratings are largely associated with a facility's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The final category we scored is long-term care, in which this facility was awarded a C. While this is its poorest category grade, this is nevertheless not a poor grade. Our long-term care grade is used to score a nursing home's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services offered by a skilled nursing facility. After assessing the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. We were optimistic to find that this facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Lastly, this facility was also able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.