Thatcher Brook Rehabilitation & Care Center

One of the reasons this turned out to be a great facility is that it received a strong short-term care score. This turned out to be its best category. In that category, we gave this facility an impressive grade of A. In determining our short-term care scores, we look at a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly trained professionals. This score is generally a useful measure of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this nursing home provided registered nurse or physical therapist staffing data. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who ultimately were able to return home from this facility. We found that 7 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

Adding to this facility's impressive resume, we awarded this facility an A for our inspections rating. These inspection ratings weigh several factors, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these items by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This facility was assessed 5 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of these deficiencies to create an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The next area we assessed was long-term care. Contributing to its strong profile, this facility also performed well in that category. In fact, we awarded it a grade of of A- in that category. For long-term care residents, the nursing home's primary objective is to maintain patients' quality of life and keep them safe. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. We were not able to track down information on vaccination rates. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In the final area, this nursing home also was awarded a first-rate nursing score, with a grade of B+. This wrapped up a first-rate report card. Our nursing rating includes quite a few subcategories, however, the most important consideration is the number of nurse hours per patient per week. This particular nursing home provided 0 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these metrics as predictive measures of the caliber of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.