Bethesda Dilworth

One of the reasons this place received a great overall grade is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. This turned out to be its best category. In this area, we awarded this facility an A-. Our nursing score is mostly associated with a nursing home's nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any place the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as having a system of turning a patient more often.

This facility has earned near flawless government inspections in recent years. We gave them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Arguably the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area typically avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Keep in mind that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

We also wanted to alert you to the fact that this facility was given an elite score of A- in our short-term care area. Our short-term care scores are critical for patients seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes a wide range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients who ultimately returned home from this nursing home. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's residents were able to return home.

In the last category we rated, this facility was given a very strong grade of B+ in our long-term care category. With this grade, the facility finished off a very favorable report card. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. This facility vaccinated 50.364964 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is a bit below what we were hoping for but still a decent percentage. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.