Bethesda Care Center

This facility earned a solid overall grade as described above, but we really wanted to point out its nearly flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in calculating our inspection grades. One key factor is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively minor. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' scale. A few minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

In addition, we also would like to note that this nursing home was given positive short-term care marks in this assessment. We awarded them one of our more impressive grades in this area, with a grade of B. This proved to be the facility's second highest grade. In determining our short-term care scores, we size up the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This grade is more often than not a fair measure of a facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final item we looked at in this category is the number of patients who returned home from the facility. We found that 4.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

The next highest grade we gave this nursing home in any area came in the category of nursing, where we gave it a grade of C. There are a variety of datapoints within this category. Most of these factors are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Finally, nursing scores also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. Despite not having the most impressive total nursing hours per resident, this nursing home actually performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is generally an indicator that a nursing home has quality controls in place. Many falls could be avoided if a facility provides enough nurses aids to assist its residents.

The final area we assessed was long-term care. Unfortunately, we gave it an abysmal F for this category, which is a very poor grade. This is obviously a significant concern. When nursing homes receive this kind of grade in this category it is a bad sign for patient care and it may mean that the place is not as well-staffed with nurses and aids. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 90.86758 percent of its residents. This is pretty significantly less than what we were hoping for. Surprisingly, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than the majority of nursing homes. This was its best score in this category.