The Tuckerman Terraces

In addition to being a strong nursing home overall, this nursing home also excelled at short-term care, where it received an A+. Few nursing homes fared better in this area. Short-term care grades are generally used to grade a nursing home's rehabilitation services. In order to provide highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature better levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other highly skilled individuals. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, according to the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Finally, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.1 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

This facility has received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A in this category. Inspection grades are based on several datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent government inspections. Places that excel in this category tend to have few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. While this place had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Moving on our third category, this nursing home was given an excellent long-term care score. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- in this area. When facilities receive this kind of grade in long-term care it is a good sign for patient care and suggests that the facility is well-staffed with nurses aids. In addition to assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 97.36842 percent of its patients, which is significantly higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The final category we scored is nursing, where this facility was given a grade of B. Even though this is its poorest category grade, this is nevertheless a favorable rating. In computing a nursing home's nursing score, we weigh the amount of time nurses are seeing patients as well as the skill levels of those nurses. 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 place performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can generally be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.