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 long-term care grade and that actually wound up as its second best category. If you are seeking anything other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at long-term care ratings. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Fortunately, this nursing home vaccinated 96.22642 percent of its residents, which is a very solid total. Surprisingly, this nursing home also fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.02 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

Among this nursing home's several poor grades was its F in the area of nursing care. Our nursing rating assesses the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We look at both the levels of training of those nurses as well as the number of hours spent with residents. This nursing home averaged a meager 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing ratings. This place fared well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these statistics to be measures of the quality of nursing care.

The last category we assessed is short-term care. Unfortunately, we gave it a lowly F for this area, which is an abysmal score. Short-term care ratings are critical for patients seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes additional highly-skilled nursing. This includes a broad spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and respiratory therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Based on its score in this category, we were not surprised to learn that this nursing home was well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the figures we looked at. Frankly, this was what we expected here. Lastly, we assessed the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.