Burlington Convalescent Hospital

While we were down on this nursing home overall, we awarded it a grade of B for our nursing rating. There are many datapoints included in this category. Many of these subcategories relate to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

We also awarded this nursing home a grade of B- for our inspections rating. This score is a more impressive than the facility's overall grade. These inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can find more information about each of these issues by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This facility was assessed 9 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to pose an immediate risk to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

The third area we analyzed was long-term care. In that area, we gave this facility a grade of B-. Long-term care grades are commonly used to judge a nursing home's performance as a traditional convalescent home, as opposed to focusing on the skilled nursing services offered by a rehabilitation facility. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. We were concerned by the fact that this nursing home vaccinated only 90.30471 percent of its patients for pneumonia. On a more positive note, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The final area we graded was short-term care, which is this nursing home's least impressive category. We gave this facility a grade of D in that category. Our short-term care grade is often used to assess a facility's performance with rehabilitation. To provide quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly trained professionals. Based on its grade in this category, we were not surprised to learn that this facility is well below average in terms of the quantity of registered nurse and physical therapy hours provided to its patients based on the figures we assessed. Frankly, this was what we expected to find. The final datapoint we considered in this category is the percentage of residents that returned home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 3.9 percent of its residents returning home.