Bethesda Southgate

In addition to being a first rate nursing home overall, this nursing home also excelled in our inspections category, where it received an A+. Few places fared as well in this category. Inspection ratings account for a host of factors found on a nursing home's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we consider is the number and severity of deficiencies. Facilities with higher scores in this area tend to have few severe deficiencies. Although this nursing home had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were severe based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This nursing home also was given a fine long-term care grade. In fact, this ended up being this facility's second most impressive category grade. In that category, we awarded this facility a score of A. If you are looking for anything other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care grades. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility administered the vaccine to 64.242424 percent of its residents. This is a few points lower than we expected. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we had hoped, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A in that category. The nursing score assesses several datapoints, most of which are tied to nursing hours. This nursing home provides 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Turning to the final category, this nursing home received an excellent short-term care score. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in that category, giving this facility straight A's. Our short-term care grades are likely most important for folks requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically utilizes more skilled nursing. This means not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final measure we assessed in this area is the number of patients that were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 5.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.