Fortress Nursing and Rehabilitation

Unfortunately, we did not have any good things to say about this place's overall grade or its other ratings. Its best category was the category of inspections. However, with a D in this area, it still performed badly. Inspection scores weigh several factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. You should be most cautious when considering a facility that has severe deficiencies on its inspection reports. This facility had 3 deficiencies by CMS. The only positive thing we found is that none of the deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they caused a threat to patient safety or health. Finally, we also would like to point out that this nursing home received large government fines recently of over $100,000. This often signifies that a facility's poor track record spanned more than one year.

We gave this facility a grade of just D for our short-term care grade and that actually wound up as its second best category. Short-term care grades are based on a facility's quantity of skilled nursing services. This means a wide range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, in addition to other types of therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides substantially less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average nursing home. Lastly, we considered the percentage of residents that who were able to eventually return home from this nursing home. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 5.4 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

Turning to the category of long-term care, this nursing home was awarded a grade of just D in this category. For patients seeking a permanent residence as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Thankfully, this nursing home gave the vaccine to 97.32825 percent of its patients, which is an above average total. Surprisingly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.03 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home had fewer hospitalizations than many nursing homes. Unfortunately, a few of its other scores in this category weren't as favorable as these.

The last area we looked at was nursing, which was a low point for this facility. We awarded this nursing home a grade of D for nursing. There are a number of factors within this grade. Many of these subcategories reflect the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. On top of receiving below average marks for nursing hours, this facility was a bit less impressive in some of the quality-based metrics we looked at in determining our nursing scores. We looked at the percentage of residents experiencing pressure ulcers and found that this place was at approximately 1.5 times the national average in this statistic. This is a bad sign when you consider that so many bed sores are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. This statistic dragged down this facility's nursing score substantially.