Great Barrington Nursing and Rehabilitation

To pair with its strong overall grade, we gave this facility an A+ for our inspections rating. Perhaps the most significant factor we look at in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this nursing home had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Additionally, this facility also was awarded favorable long-term care grades this year. In fact, we awarded it one of our higher scores in that category, with a score of B+. In a long-term care environment, the facility's primary objective is to maintain residents' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to assessing the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 88.535034 percent of its residents. This is slightly below what we anticipated but still a decent figure. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand 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. Our nursing grade is primarily based on a facility's nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 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 nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be prevented if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Moving on to our next category, this nursing home was awarded an acceptable short-term care grade of C. Short-term care grades are typically used to measure a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer good rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to have higher levels of skilled nursing. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists and other highly trained professionals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last datapoint we looked at in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 3.3 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is actually below average.