Cambridge Place

This facility's overall grade was propped up by the fact that it has received favorable health inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our better scores in that area, with a B+. This is a much better grade than the nursing home's overall score. Arguably the most critical factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Places with better grades in this category typically dodged the more severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. While this place had some 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 the inspectors did not deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Remember that deficiency-free inspection reports are uncommon in the industry.

In addition, we awarded this nursing home a grade of B+ in our nursing category. This is one of our better grades. Our nursing rating is primarily based on a nursing home's nurse staffing. This facility provided 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 nursing home performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can frequently be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

Additionally, we also would like to point out that this nursing home received favorable long-term care marks this year. We awarded them one of our more impressive grades in that category, with a B. If you are looking for services other than rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care scores. In addition to assessing the amount of care provided by aids and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 90 percent of its patients. This is a few points less than we were hoping for. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we hoped for, at least this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The final category we assessed is short-term care. We awarded this facility a D in short-term care, making this the nursing home's worst category grade. Short-term care grades are commonly employed to judge a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To provide highly graded rehabilitation services, nursing homes generally must feature better levels of skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. It appears that this place was subpar in terms of its quantity of physical therapy and registered nurse hours offered to its residents based on the measures we assessed. The final datapoint we considered in this area is the number of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.2 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics was damning for this nursing home's short-term care score.