Bedford Alzheimer's Care Center

On top of being a strong nursing home overall, it also earned A+ inspections in recent years. Its inspections are virtually perfect. Inspection grades are tied to many pieces of information found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that excel in this area have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do 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.

This facility also performed well in the category of long-term care, where we awarded it a grade of A. Few nursing homes received a better grade in this area. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine healthcare services. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 94.5946 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is too frequently a life or death illness for nursing home residents so we strongly prefer when a nursing home does not leave this to chance. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. The nursing grade consists of quite a few datapoints, however, the primary consideration is the quantity of nurse hours per patient per week. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also assessed some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Turning to our final category, this facility was given a strong short-term care score. We awarded it a B+ in that category, finishing off one of our better report cards. Short-term care ratings are vital for individuals needing rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually mandates more skilled nursing services. Skilled nursing means a wide range of nursing services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we looked at the percentage of patients that ultimately were able to return home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.