Care One at Lowell

The primary reason this nursing home received a decent overall score is its excellent inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our higher scores in that area, with an A-. This is a notably better grade than the facility's overall score, which was decent but certainly not elite. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This facility was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This means that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies an imminent risk to patient health or safety. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't stop you from considering a nursing home.

One of this nursing home's higher category grades came in the category of long-term care. This wound up being its second most favorable category. In that category, we gave this nursing home a B-. If you are looking for services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each facility's long-term care grades. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we turned to the nursing home's vaccination records. We were concerned by the fact that this nursing home vaccinated just 53.333332 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Nevertheless, this facility excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

We also gave this nursing home a decent score in the category of nursing care, with a grade of C. Nursing scores are tied to levels of nurse staffing. This place provides only 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. This is a somewhat uninspiring figure as it is well below average. Despite having low quantities of nursing care, this facility actually fared better in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. In fact, it scored well when it comes to avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. Many consider these areas to be good measures of the quality of nursing care. In some cases, the quality of nursing care is as important as the number of hours of care provided.

The last area we assessed was short-term care, which is this nursing home's weakest area. We awarded this facility a grade of D in that area. In our short-term care score, we strive to create a sound barometer for rehabilitation. In doing so, we analyze a facility's scope of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. The last statistic we considered in this area is the number of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that just 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home, which is well below average. The combination of these poor metrics doomed this facility's short-term care score.