Focused Care at Beechnut

While we did not give this nursing home a good overall grade, we surprisingly gave it a strong score in the area of long-term care, where it received a B+. This is better than most nursing homes in this category. This helped an otherwise poor profile. When nursing homes receive a grade in this range in this category it typically means it's well-staffed and is a quality place to reside on a permanent basis. In addition to considering the amount of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a life or death illness for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility doesn't roll the dice on this issue. Clearly, this facility 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 one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Surprisingly, this facility actually earned a good grade in the area of inspections as well. In fact, we gave it a B for that category, which is one of our better grades. Not many nursing homes that were this poor overall received multiple category grades of this caliber. Arguably the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. It is typically in your best interest to avoid places that have too many severe deficiencies. Although this facility had a few deficiencies on its report, none were serious based on CMS' scale. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

Sadly, this facility's third highest score is short-term care. As it turns out, with a grade of D in this area, it still fared relatively badly. In calculating our short-term care scores, we scrutinize the nursing home's levels of skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists respiratory therapists and other types of therapists. This score is considered to be a reliable assessment of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The last measure we assessed in this area is the percentage of patients who returned home from the nursing home. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its patients returning home. Unfortunately, this was quite a bit below the national average.

The next category we analyzed was nursing, where this facility was given an abysmal score here as well. Unfortunately, we gave it an F in this category, which is obviously somewhat alarming. The nursing rating weighs a handful of factors, most of which are based on nursing hours. This facility provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a very low total compared to most nursing homes. In addition to receiving below average marks for total nursing hours, this facility was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based measures we looked at in calculating our nursing grades. We looked at the percent of patients suffering pressure ulcers and found this facility was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in this metric.