New Milford Nursing Home Nabs Top Rating in Latest Rankings

NEW MILFORD, CT — The federal government has given one nursing home in New Milford a five-star rating after tweaking the way it assesses thousands of nursing homes nationwide. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services last month revised its inspection process and began providing improved staffing details and new quality metrics. The changes were aimed at providing more transparent and meaningful information about the quality of care that residents receive.

Both of New Milford's nursing homes scored well. Village Crest Center for Health & Rehabilitation received the highest, five-star rating, and Candlewood Valley Health & Rehabilitation Center was awarded four stars.

Nursing homes with five stars are considered to have above-average quality while those with one star are considered to have below-average quality.

If the rating for your mother-in-law's home dropped from last year's assessment, it may be because the criteria have gotten more stringent. For example, the bar for staffing levels has been raised. Under the previous method, automatic one-star ratings would be doled out to nursing homes that reported having no registered nurse on site for at least seven days in a quarter. That threshold has since been lowered to four days.

The complete online database of rankings for every Medicare-certified nursing home in America is available here.

Patch national staffers Dan Hampton and Brian McCready did all the heavy lifting for this report.