Agawam Healthcare

Agawam Healthcare is a large nursing home located in Agawam, Massachusetts. With an overall rating of B-, this looks like a solid facility. You could certainly do worse than this place. The best part of this place's report card was is its short-term care grade. short-term care grades are discussed in the next paragraph.

This nursing home really excelled in our short-term care category. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. This salvaged its profile. In the area of short-term care, we try to assess measures of a nursing home's rehabilitation. We analyze a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and various therapists. One of this nursing home's strengths is physical therapy hours. We found that it offers at least 50% more hours with physical therapists to its residents than most other facilities. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that it outperformed the vast majority of facilities with 57.2 percent of its residents returning home.

One of the other reasons we graded this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. In that category, we gave this facility an B+. In determining our nursing scores, we look at both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the training levels of those nurses. This facility provided 3.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this place 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 country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by providing better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving a patient at least once a day.

It should also be noted that this facility's inspection score was strong as well. In fact, we awarded it a grade of B for its government inspection reports, which is one of our better scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in calculating these inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is arguably more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively insignificant. This facility was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This tells you that the inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to be an immediate threat to resident health or safety. The fact that none of the deficiencies were severe leaves us less concerned with this inspection report.

The last category we assessed was long-term care. For this category, we gave this facility a C. For residents in need of a permanent residence as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is a very important category. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we analyzed the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 61.46497 percent of its patients. This is significantly lower than what we were hoping for. The last datapoint we assessed was the facility's hospitalization rate. Here we found that this place had 1.74 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is also below average.