Care One at Newton

One of the reasons this ended up being a quality facility is that it earned an impressive inspection rating. Inspections is its best category. In this area, we gave it an A. Inspection scores weigh several factors, including deficiencies and substantiated complaints. You can learn more about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. Although this place had some deficiencies on its report, none of them were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. A few relatively minor dings are not necessarily something to panic about.

Additionally, this nursing home also received favorable short-term care scores in our assessment. In fact, we gave them one of our higher grades in that category, with a score of B+. In determining our short-term care scores, we analyze a nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists speech therapists and other types of therapists. This score is typically a reliable assessment of a facility's rehabilitation services. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. 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. The final statistic we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 5.6 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This nursing home also was awarded an impressive long-term care score. Indeed, we awarded it an above average grade of B in this area. In a long-term care environment, the nursing home's primary objective is to keep patients healthy and safe. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate patients. On top of looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This nursing home vaccinated 78.85906 percent of its residents. This is slightly less than we expected but still a respectable percentage. 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 one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

The last category we assessed was nursing, where this nursing home was awarded a grade of B. This facility did not end up having any weaknesses. Our nursing score focuses on the nursing home's nurse staffing levels. We factor in both the levels of skill of the nurses as well as the number of hours spent with patients. This nursing home provides 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility Massachusetts in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as employing a system of moving a patient more frequently.