Bethesda Care Center

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this facility really excelled in the category of inspections, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Our inspection grades account for a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection report. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Nursing homes with better grades in this category tend to have very few severe deficiencies. This nursing home received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This means that CMS didn't deem any of these deficiencies to cause an imminent risk to resident health or safety. A couple of minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

We also gave this nursing home an impressive grade in short-term care. This nursing home earned a grade of B+ in this category, which happens to be one of our higher scores. Short-term care scores are meaningful for individuals seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires additional highly-skilled nursing. This means a vast range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final item we looked at in this category is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This nursing home's nursing grade appears to be one of its better features. The facility received a grade of C in this category. We looked at the licensure of nurses at the nursing home, as well as the number of hours the nurses worked with residents, in determining our grade in this category. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility actually fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at. It performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the number of hours of care offered.

This facility's weakest category is long-term care, which is the final category we scored. Unfortunately, we gave it an F for this area. Despite a few decent grades in other areas, this score is nevertheless disappointing so we felt obligated to draw your attention to it. For residents looking for a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 93.95349 percent of its residents. To our surprise, this facility also fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.