Altercare Cambridge

The main reason this facility received a decent overall grade is its excellent health inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with an A-. This is a notably better score than the place's overall score, which was decent but not in the elite range. Inspection scores are tied to pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Another one of this nursing home's more favorable category grades was in the category of long-term care. In that category, we gave this nursing home a B+. It actually outperformed most facilities in this area. When facilities receive this type of score in long-term care it is typically a good sign for resident care and indicates that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. After considering the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is much higher than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

In addition, we awarded this facility a B in our short-term care category. This happens to be one of our more favorable scores. Short-term care grades are based on the facility's quantity of highly-skilled nursing services. This means a wide scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from this facility. We found that 5.1 percent of this facility's patients returned home.

The last area we assessed was nursing. We gave this facility a D in our nursing category, leaving this as its least impressive area. Our nursing rating weighs a host of subcategories. The most heavily weighted factor is the number of hours nurses spend with patients. With only 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient each day, this nursing home's nurse staffing levels were significantly below the national average. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing scores. This nursing home fared well in the area of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these statistics to be good measures of the quality of nursing care.