Crystal Care Center of Portsmouth

Although we did not rate this nursing home favorably overall, we want to point out its relatively favorable government inspections in recent years. We gave it a respectable grade of B+ in this area, which was much better than its overall grade. Our inspection scores are tied to many items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important item to look for on these inspections. Most importantly, you should avoid facilities with severe deficiencies linked to endangerment of patients. This facility was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered to be major deficiencies. This indicates that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies to create an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not the end of the world.

This nursing home's second best category turned out to be long-term care. In that area, we awarded this facility a grade of C. In our long-term care rating, we weigh the volume of care offered by a nursing home, as well as a few qualitative measures. After assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we turned to the facility's vaccination data. We were disappointed to learn that this facility vaccinated a relatively low 71.264366 percent of its residents for pneumonia. On a more positive note, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

We awarded this nursing home just a D for our short-term care grade. This is well below average in this category. In calculating our short-term care grades, we assess the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. The objective is to create a tool for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Considering its score in this category, we weren't stunned to learn that this place is well below average in terms of its number of registered nurse and physical therapy hours offered to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. Honestly, this was what we expected to find. The final metric we looked at in this category is the number of residents that eventually returned home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its residents returning home. Unfortunately, this was quite a bit below the national average.

The final category we looked at was nursing. This facility received an abysmal grade of F in this category. Nursing ratings are based largely on quality and quantity of nursing care. With just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident daily, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were significantly below the national average. To go along with its low totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this facility had poor scores in many of the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. For starters, we looked at the percentage of residents experiencing falls leading to major injury. This place was at more than 1.5 times the national average in this statistic. This is quite alarming in light of the fact that so many falls could likely be prevented with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the nursing home's fate of earning a poor nursing rating.