Harborview Health Systems Thomaston

While we graded this place incredibly poorly overall, it actually earned a fairly impressive government inspection report this year. As a result, it earned one of our better scores in that category with a B. Inspection ratings weigh a host of factors found on a facility's inspection report. One key criteria we look at is the number and severity of deficiencies. You should avoid facilities with a list of severe deficiencies flagged. This place was hit with 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be major deficiencies. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to cause an immediate risk to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't the end of the world.

Sadly, this nursing home's next most favorable category was long-term care. As it turns out, with a grade of D in this area, it still fared relatively badly. For residents looking for a permanent place to live rather than rehabilitation, long-term care grades are an important measure. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Fortunately, this facility administered the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is a very solid percentage. Surprisingly, this facility was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had just 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.

Sadly, this facility's third best score was short-term care. However, with a grade of D in this category, it still fared relatively poorly. Our short-term care scores are crucial for residents needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes more skilled nursing. This means a vast spectrum of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other types of therapy. Given its score in this area, we were not surprised to find that this place was well below average in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours provided to its residents based on the data we looked at. The final measure we assessed in this category is the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. This facility struggled quite a bit in this metric as well, with just 4.5 percent of its residents returning home. This was quite a bit below the national average.

The last category we graded is nursing, where this nursing home was given an abysmal score in this category as well. We gave it an F for this area, which is definitely very concerning. In calculating our nursing scores, we factor in both nursing hours and the skill levels of those nurses. With only 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident daily, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were quite a bit below average. To pair with its subpar totals in the area of nursing hours per resident, this nursing home also didn't fare as well in the quality-based measures we looked at in computing our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of residents experiencing major falls and pressure ulcers. This place had more pressure ulcers and falls than the average facility. This may be a bad sign when you consider that many bed sores and falls are believed to be preventable with better nursing care. These scores hurt this facility's nursing grade quite a bit.