Cambridge Care and Rehabilitation

Even though this facility's overall grade was as bad as it gets, it actually didn't perform as poorly in the area of nursing. We gave it a C for this area. In calculating a facility's nursing rating, we weigh the amount of time nurses are seeing residents and the skill levels of those nurses. This nursing home provides 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a much lower figure than we are used to seeing. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility excelled in some of the quality measures we assessed. In fact, it performed well in terms of minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be reliable indicators of the quality of nursing care. In many cases, the quality of nursing care is every bit as important as the number of hours of care offered.

We awarded this facility just a D for our short-term care score and that actually ended up being its second highest category. In calculating our short-term care grades, we scrutinize a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This area is generally a meaningful assessment of the nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Considering its score in this category, we weren't surprised to find that this facility was well below average in terms of the quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its patients based on the data we looked at. Frankly, this was what we expected here. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who were able to return home from this facility. This nursing home didn't fare well here either. In fact, we found that just 4.8 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home.

This nursing home received very poor inspections in recent years, causing us to give them an F for inspections. An F in this area is usually a signal that there were red flags on the nursing home's government inspection reports. For nursing homes with bad inspection scores, you should scrutinize any severe deficiencies found on their recent inspection reports. This particular nursing home had 7 deficiencies by CMS. The only favorable thing we can say is that none of these deficiencies were in the categories that suggest that they created a risk to patient safety or health. Lastly, we also need to draw your attention to the fact that this facility was assessed significant government fines recently amounting to more than $100,000. This generally suggests that a nursing home's poor track record spanned more than one year.

The last area we assessed is long-term care, in which this nursing home received a bottom of the barrel grade here as well. Sadly, it received an F in this category, which is obviously a major concern. Facilities that don't fare well in this category often do not provide as much nursing care and also may be struggling in a few of the areas of routine healthcare services we looked at. On top of assessing the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home provided the vaccine to 91.47727 percent of its patients. This is slightly less than we expected but still a reasonably acceptable figure. Surprisingly, this facility actually fared well at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days. This is its best feature in this category.