Healthbridge Post-Acute Rehabilitation

This nursing home really excelled in our short-term care category, with an A in this category. In determining our short-term care scores, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The objective is to create a scale for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home employs registered nurses. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last metric we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that 7.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing score. This proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B+. Our nursing grade looks at the nursing home's level of nurse staffing. We look at both the levels of training of those nurses and the amount of time spent with residents. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can often be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving a patient at least once a day.

Turning to inspections, we gave this nursing home a D. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection grades. One key factor is deficiencies. We recommend you pay close attention to the level of severity of those deficiencies. This particular facility was assessed 2 deficiencies by government inspectors. The only positive thing we can say is that none of its deficiencies were in the categories that indicate that they posed a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, we also need to point out that this facility was assessed large government fines recently of more than $50,000. This typically signifies that CMS inspectors grew tired after multiple years of bad health inspections.

Switching gears to the fourth category, this nursing home really did not fare very well. With a poor grade of F in long-term care, this was this nursing home's weakest grade. For prospective residents in need of a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Thankfully, this facility provided the vaccine to 100 percent of its patients, which is an above average figure. To our surprise, this nursing home also keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. Sadly, some of its other scores in the category were not as favorable as these.