Blough Health Care Center

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is it received an A+ in our inspections category. This is simply as good as it gets in this critical area. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this place had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not something to panic about.

This nursing home also received a very impressive short-term care score. This actually ended up being this facility's second best category grade. In that area, we awarded this facility a score of A. Our short-term care grade is often employed to grade a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to provide good rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 5.1 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A- in our nursing category. Our nursing grade includes quite a few components, however, the primary one is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This facility performed very well in terms of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The final area we looked at ended up being this facility's weakest area. However, even in its worst category we still awarded it a respectable grade of B- in long-term care. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. One of the statistics we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. Unfortunately, it does not look like this facility submitted information about vaccinations. Lastly, this nursing home keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.