Bethesda Rehab & Senior Care

Although this place's overall score was not a highlight, it did receive a very good grade in the category of inspections. We awarded it a B+ for that category, which is one of our better grades. Inspection ratings are tied to pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are a key thing to look for on these inspections. Most importantly, you should avoid nursing homes with severe deficiencies linked to risks to resident well being. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

We also ended up giving this facility a fairly respectable grade in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of B-. We analyzed the levels of nurses employed by the facility, as well as the number of hours those nurses were with patients, in determining our grade in this area. This place provides only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a somewhat alarming figure as it is well below the national average. Finally, nursing scores also factor in quality-based metrics, such as preventing major falls. Despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this place performed admirably in the area of preventing major falls. This is generally a reliable indicator that a facility has quality controls in place. Some falls can be avoided if a nursing home supplies enough nurses aids to assist its patients.

Unfortunately, this facility only received a D for its short-term care score, which is well below average in this category. Our short-term care ratings are arguably most meaningful for patients needing a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This means not merely nursing, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Considering its score in this category, we were not surprised to find that this nursing home is well below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the measures we assessed. Honestly, this was about what we expected here. The last metric we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.2 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these subpar statistics was damning for this nursing home's short-term care score.

Moving on to the next area, we awarded this nursing home a D in our long-term care category. This is the nursing home's worst category rating. When facilities receive this kind of score in long-term care it is often a bad sign for resident care and it may indicate that the place is not as well-staffed. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Frankly, we were a bit worried that this facility gave the vaccine to just 83.39921 percent of its patients. To our surprise, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility had less hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This is its best feature in this category.