With a population of 82,752 , Dorchester, Massachusetts is an average size city. Surprisingly, there are just 2 nursing homes there, which is not quite as many as we expected in a city of this size. We awarded the nursing homes here an excellent city grade of A-. Even with just a couple of facilities, this is still a great achievement. For comparison's sake, we also looked at the facilities in the nearby city of Peabody, which received a city grade of B+. As good as the nursing homes are in Peabody, we found Dorchester to be even better. On top of this, Dorchester is also one of the top 250 cities in the entire nation.
In addition to performing well in its overall grade, the nursing homes in Dorchester performed extremely well in terms of its inspection grade. In fact, some of the nursing homes in the city received almost flawless inspection reports this year. Consequently, Dorchester received one of our best ratings in that category with an A. Arguably the most significant factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better scores in this category most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. We also wanted to point out that we awarded the city an A- in our nursing category. Wrapping up its straight A report card, Dorchester received an A- in our long-term care category and a grade of A- in short-term care.