Bethesda Home

On top of being a quality facility overall, this nursing home really fared well in long-term care, where it received a grade of A-. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it generally means it's well-staffed and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 98.65772 percent of its residents. Vaccines are vital to keeping patients out of the hospital. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home also performed well in the area of inspections. In fact, it received a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best scores in that category with an A-. Few facilities with an overall score in this range performed this well in multiple categories. Inspection grades account for a host of factors found on a facility's inspection reports. One key criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher scores in this area tend to have few of these severe deficiencies. Surprisingly, this nursing home was hit with a category L deficiency, which was unexpected based on its inspection rating. This category of deficiency means inspectors found a widespread deficiency putting patient safety or health in immediate danger. Even a single serious deficiency of this nature should be taken seriously. In spite of this major red flag, other aspects of this facility's inspection report gave us some hope.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B+ for its nursing rating. This is a well above average score in this category. Our nursing grade weighs numerous datapoints. The most heavily weighted variable is the quantity of hours nurses spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The last area we looked at was short-term care, in which this nursing home received a grade of B. This facility did not end up having any weak links. In computing our short-term care ratings, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to devise a tool for comparing the rehabilitation services of different nursing homes. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down registered nurse or physical therapy staffing data for this facility. The final measure we assessed in this area is the number of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.