Blaire House of Worcester

In addition to being a quality nursing home overall, this facility excelled in our inspections category, where it earned an A. Not many facilities performed better in this area. Perhaps the most significant factor we consider in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Facilities with better grades in this category most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. We should note that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in this industry.

This facility received a very good nursing grade this year as well. It received one of our better scores in that category with a grade of B. The nursing score consists of many datapoints, however, the most important consideration is the level of nurse hours per patient per week. This facility provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this nursing home 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 nation 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 having a protocol of turning a patient more frequently.

Turning to our third area, this nursing home also received a score of B for its long-term care rating. This is an above average grade in this area. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. In addition to considering the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This nursing home administered the vaccine to 99.10314 percent of its patients, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia tragically can be a deadly health condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave this to chance. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The last area we rated is short-term care. In this category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of C. Our short-term care scores are based in part on a facility's quantity of skilled nursing services. This means a broad spectrum of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other variations of therapy. It does not appear that this nursing home provided information on registered nurse or physical therapist staffing. The final metric we considered in this category is the percentage of residents that were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 0 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.