Great Barrington Nursing and Rehabilitation

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. Fortunately, although this facility had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

In addition, this nursing home also received favorable long-term care grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our more favorable scores in that category, with a grade of B+. For prospective residents in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care grades are a key measure. On top of considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 88.535034 percent of its patients, which is somewhat below what we expected. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Adding to its profile, this facility also earned a grade of B for its nursing rating. This is a well above average score in this category. The nursing grade is based on several factors, most of which are based on nursing hours. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality-based metrics in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of minimizing its residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

The last area we looked at is short-term care, where this nursing home was awarded a grade of B-. While this proved to be its weakest category grade, this is still nothing to be ashamed of. Our short-term care ratings are probably most important for residents in need of a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally requires more highly-skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means not just nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other types of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of residents who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 3.3 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.