Care One at Newton

In addition to being a quality facility overall, this facility really excelled in our short-term care rating, where it earned a grade of A-. Few facilities fared better in this area. Our short-term care ratings are based in part on a facility's quantity of skilled skilled healthcare professionals. This means a broad scope of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, not to mention other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the data this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. We found that 6 percent of this facility's residents returned home.

We also want to emphasize this nursing home's nearly flawless government inspections recently. We awarded them an impressive grade of A- in this category. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in determining these inspection scores. One critical factor is deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some end up being relatively insignificant. This nursing home received 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered severe. This means that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies an immediate threat to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in the industry.

This nursing home also received a strong long-term care score. Indeed, we gave it an above average score of B+ in this category. Long-term care scores in this range generally require both 24/7 care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 73.75 percent of its residents. This is a bit lower than we were hoping for. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

Moving on to our last area, this nursing home was awarded a respectable nursing grade. Even though this wasn't quite as dominant as a few of its other grades, this is really not a major area of concern. In computing our nursing grades, we assess both staffing levels and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This facility provides only 0.4 hours of nursing care per patient per day. This is a somewhat uninspiring figure which is well below average. Lastly, although this place got dinged a bit for its nursing hours per resident, it excelled in a few of our quality-based measures. With less than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it did very well in this metric.