The Tuckerman Terraces

On top of being a first rate nursing home overall, this facility also performed well in our inspections category, where it earned an A+. Few nursing homes fared as well in this category. Our inspection grades are tied to datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that excel in this category typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G through 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. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also excelled in the category of short-term care, where it received a grade of A. Very few nursing homes received a better grade in this area. Short-term care grades are typically used to judge a facility's performance with rehabilitation. In order to offer quality rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to offer better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other types of therapists. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this category is the number of patients that returned home from the nursing home. We found that 6.8 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

The third category we assessed is long-term care. Adding to its first-rate profile, this facility also excelled in this category. In fact, it received a grade of of A for that area. For prospective residents seeking a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. On top of looking at the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. We were not able to locate this facility's vaccination rates. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In the last category we looked at, this facility was given a very favorable grade of A- in our nursing category. With this score, the nursing home wrapped up a straight A report card. Nursing ratings are based in large part on nurse staffing levels. This particular nursing home provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at certain nursing quality measures in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these statistics as predictive indicators of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.