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 in excess of $50,000. This typically signifies that inspectors grew tired after multiple years of failed government inspections.

This nursing home wound up receiving a a very poor grade in our short-term care category. It was given an F in this category. Our short-term care ratings are crucial for prospective residents looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually requires higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing includes a wide spectrum of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Given its grade in this category, we were not stunned to find that this nursing home is well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the metrics we assessed. The last statistic we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients that who were able to eventually return home from the facility. This nursing home struggled quite a bit in this area as well, with just 0 percent of its residents returning home. This was quite a bit below the national average.

In addition, we gave this facility an F in the area of nursing care. Nursing scores are based largely on quantity of nursing care available. This place averaged only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day. This is not a very impressive figure. Lastly, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls.

The last category we graded was long-term care, where this nursing home received a poor grade here as well. It received a lowly F for this category, which is obviously a major disappointment. Nursing homes that do not fare well in this category typically are not as well-staffed and are lagging in some of the areas of routine personal care we looked at. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination data. We were disappointed to learn that this nursing home vaccinated just 88.21138 percent of its residents for pneumonia. To our surprise, this facility was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, this facility has fewer hospitalizations than the average nursing home. This was its best score in this category.