Blumenthal Nursing & Rehabilitation

While we graded this facility incredibly poorly overall, it received a fairly respectable inspection report this year. As a result, it received a decent grade in that category with a score of B-. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining our inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more important than the quantity of deficiencies, as some deficiencies end up being quite minor. This particular nursing home received 10 deficiencies on its inspection report. Overall, this is still a solid inspection report, but we'd always recommend looking into any deficiencies you find troubling.

We awarded this facility a grade of just D for our short-term care grade and that actually ended up being its next most favorable category. Our short-term care ratings are considered to be more important for patients in need of rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not just nursing services, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other types of therapy. As you might expect, we found that this facility offers far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than a typical facility. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This definitely was not a strength for this facility. We found that just 4.9 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.

Our third category we looked at was long-term care, in which this facility received an F. Long-term care scores of this caliber generally are a bad sign for the quantity and quality of care provided by nurses and aids. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility provided the vaccine to 86.052635 percent of its patients. This is many points less than what we were hoping for. To our surprise, this nursing home actually fared well at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best score in this category.

The final area we rated is nursing, where this facility received an abysmal grade in this category as well. Sadly, it received a lowly F for this area, which is definitely a major disappointment. When calculating a facility's nursing grade, we look at the quantity of hours nurses are seeing patients and the level of licensure of those nurses. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This statistic is quite a bit below the national average. To go along with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this facility also did not perform as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of patients experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This facility had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average nursing home. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These scores pulled down this nursing home's nursing grade quite a bit.