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. A few minor deficiencies should not lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

This facility also was given a positive long-term care grade. As a matter of fact, we awarded them a B in this category, which is one of our more favorable scores. Facilities that do well in this category typically provide patients with more supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. On top of assessing the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home gave the vaccine to 94.23077 percent of its residents, which is higher than most nursing homes. Clearly, this nursing home 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 an impressively low figure.

This nursing home's next best category was nursing. We awarded it a grade of B- in this category. This is basically a middle of the road grade in this category. Our nursing grade includes many factors, many of which are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided just 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a relatively low total compared to most other facilities. Lastly, despite not having the highest total nursing hours per resident, this facility performed admirably in the metric of preventing major falls. This is often a good indicator that a facility has sufficient quality controls in place.

The final category we looked at is short-term care. This facility was given a grade of C in the area. Short-term care grades are typically used to score a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to feature higher levels of skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. In this facility's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the average facility. The hope is always that this does not adversely impact the quality of care. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 3.7 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.