Bethesda Home

On top of being a first rate nursing home overall, this nursing home also fared well in long-term care, where it earned an A+. Few facilities performed better in this category. When facilities receive a grade in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 98.46154 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia tragically can be a dangerous condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

This facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Surprisingly, this nursing home was hit with a category L deficiency, which was unexpected based on its inspection rating. This category means inspectors uncovered a widespread deficiency placing resident health or safety in imminent jeopardy. In spite of this major red flag, other aspects of this facility's inspection report gave us some hope.

Adding to its impressive resume, this nursing home also excelled in our nursing category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category. When determining a facility's nursing grade, we assess the amount of time nurses are with patients as well as the skill levels of the nurses. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility 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 nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of turning patients even once per day.

The final area we scored was this nursing home's weakest area. Nevertheless, even its lowest point would actually be a highlight for most nursing homes. We gave it a strong grade of B in short-term care. Our short-term care grades are based on a nursing home's quantity of highly-skilled highly skilled professionals. This means a wide spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we assessed in this category is the number of patients who who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.