Bradley Health Care & Rehab

The primary reason this turned out to be a decent nursing home is that it received an excellent inspection score. Its inspection grade was far superior to its overall grade. In the inspections category, we gave this facility an A. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in computing our inspection ratings is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities with better scores in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. This facility received 6 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to cause an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This nursing home received its second best category grade in the area of long-term care. We awarded this facility a B- in this area, which is a reasonably acceptable score. In determining these long-term care ratings, we look at the facility's ability to maintain its permanent residents' health and quality of life. One of the criteria we considered after nurse's aid hours was vaccines. Thankfully, this facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 100 percent of its patients. This facility keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 1.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a significantly lower hospitalization rate than the average nursing home.

The third category we analyzed was short-term care, where this facility was awarded a grade of C in this category. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to measure a nursing home's rehabilitation services To provide highly rated rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to provide better levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This nursing home boosted its score in this category by offering more than 50% more physical therapy hours to its residents than the average facility. The final datapoint we considered in this area is the number of residents that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. It fared better than most nursing homes in this metric with 49.2 percent of its patients returning home.

Moving on to our next category, we gave this nursing home a D for our nursing category. This was the nursing home's weakest category grade. We assessed the skill-level of nurses working for the facility, as well as the number of hours those nurses spent with residents, in calculating our grade in this category. This place provided just 3.3 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This is well below average. On top of receiving below average scores for nursing hours, this facility was less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in computing our nursing scores. We looked at the percent of patients sustaining pressure ulcers and found that this place was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in this metric. This is likely a bad sign when you consider that many pressure ulcers are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This statistic really pulled down this nursing home's nursing score substantially.