Burnsides Community Health Center

In addition to being a respectable facility overall, this facility also excelled in the category of inspections, where it received an A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this category. These inspection grades weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A couple of minor deficiencies should not stop you from considering a nursing home.

This facility's second best area was its long-term care grade, where it was awarded a grade of C. For residents looking for a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care grades are an important measure. After we finished looking at the volume of nursing care, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination data. We were optimistic to discover that this facility vaccinates 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia. This facility also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.03 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

This nursing home's nursing grade appears to be one of its better features. The facility received a grade of C in this category. When determining our nursing ratings, we weigh both nursing hours and the training levels of those nurses. This nursing home provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient on a daily basis. This figure is far below the national average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility surprisingly fared better in some of the quality measures we looked at. In fact, it performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

This facility's weakest category was short-term care, which is the final area we scored. For this area, we awarded this facility a D. Short-term care grades are generally employed to score a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to have highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally need to offer higher levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Considering its score in this area, we were not stunned to learn that this facility was well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the measures we assessed. The last statistic we considered in this category is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.7 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor statistics was damning for this facility's short-term care grade.