Focused Care at Beechnut

While we did not rate this nursing home favorably overall, we want to point out its relatively favorable inspections in recent years. We gave it a respectable grade of B+ in this area, which was much better than its overall grade. Inspection grades are based on several pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important item to look for on these reports. Most importantly, you should avoid nursing homes with severe deficiencies linked to endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G through L. This tells you CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few minor deficiencies are not necessarily the end of the world.

In addition, we also wanted to note that this facility received impressive long-term care marks in this assessment. We gave them one of our higher grades in this area, with a B+. This turned out to be the nursing home's second strongest score. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to live on a permanent basis. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 97.342995 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia is often a life threatening health condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

We gave this facility just a D for our short-term care score. This is not an impressive grade. Our short-term care grades are vital for residents seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation typically requires higher levels of skilled nursing services. This means a wide scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. With its score in this category, we weren't stunned to discover that this nursing home is well below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. Finally, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

The next area we rated was nursing. Unfortunately, we gave it an F in this category, which is a bottom of the barrel grade. Nursing grades are tied to quality and quantity of nursing care. With a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below average. Finally, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing ratings. This facility performed well in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls. Many consider these statistics to be reliable measures of the quality of nursing care.