Gamma Road Lodge

This nursing home received a strong overall grade as discussed above, but we especially wanted to emphasize its excellent nursing score. We gave them an A in this category. Our nursing rating focuses on the facility's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the number of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility also was awarded a favorable short-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it an above average score of B in this area. In our short-term care score, we seek to craft a sound measure for rehabilitation. In this process, we look at a nursing home's level of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as occupational therapy. We weren't able to locate information on registered nurse or physical therapy staffing for this nursing home. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 0 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

This nursing home earned a very good government inspection report this year as well. For this reason, it received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B. We take several aspects of a facility's inspection report into consideration in determining these inspection scores. One key factor is deficiencies. It should be noted that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the quantity of deficiencies, as some of these can be relatively minor. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were serious based on CMS' deficiency scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are rare in this industry.

The next category we analyzed was long-term care. We gave this facility a grade of B- in that area. Long-term care grades are based in part on a facility's volume of nursing services. This means a broad range of personal care services, ranging from assistance with activities of daily living to routine medical services. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 3.658535 percent of its patients. This is multiple points below what we were hoping for. On a more positive note, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.