Alliance Health at Braintree

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this facility a grade of A for our short-term care grade. In our short-term care rating, we seek to forge a valuable measure for rehabilitation services. In this process, we assess a facility's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. However, according to the information they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final item we looked at in this category is the number of residents that who were able to eventually return home from the nursing home. We found that 6.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Adding to its impressive profile, this facility also performed well in the category of inspections. In fact, it earned a nearly flawless government inspection report this year. As a result, it received one of our best grades in that area with an A-. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies can be found on a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this nursing home had a few deficiencies on its government inspection report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. We should point out that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

Another one of this facility's impressive category grades came in the area of nursing care. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. Our nursing score includes a handful of datapoints, most of which are tied to nursing hours. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The final category we analyzed is long-term care. This nursing home was awarded a strong long-term care score in our assessment, with a grade of B. This nursing home truly doesn't have any weak links. Facilities that do well in this category typically provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. On top of looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 95.416664 percent of its patients, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia sadly can be a life threatening ailment for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility does not take any chances. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.