Alliance Health at Abbott

We also would like to emphasize the fact that this facility has received excellent health inspections recently. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. Arguably the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection grades is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with higher scores in this area most likely dodged the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This facility was assessed 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe. This indicates that CMS did not consider any of these deficiencies to be an imminent risk to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Compounding its high-end performance in other areas, we gave this nursing home a score of A- for its long-term care grade. Nursing homes that excel in long-term care tend to provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine medical care. One of the factors we considered on top of nursing hours was vaccines. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccination to 99.0991 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a great way to avoid unnecessary deaths and hospitalizations for the senior population. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The next area we assessed is short-term care. Contributing to its high-end profile, this nursing home also performed well in that area. In fact, we gave it a of A- in that category. With our short-term care rating, we strive to craft a valuable barometer for rehabilitation services. In doing so, we analyze the facility's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last item we looked at in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the facility and return home. We found that 6.1 percent of this nursing home's patients were able to return home.

In our last area, this nursing home also received an excellent nursing grade, with a grade of B+. This wrapped up a very impressive report card. Our nursing score looks at the facility's level of nurse staffing. We consider both the levels of licensure of those nurses and the number of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures 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 Massachusetts in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can frequently be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of turning patients more frequently.