Charlestown Community

In addition to being a quality nursing home overall, this nursing home really excelled in the category of short-term care, where it received an A. Few nursing homes fared better in this area. In determining our short-term care grades, we scrutinize the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing services, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. This grade is frequently a useful assessment of the facility's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final measure we considered in this area is the number of patients that returned home from the facility. We found that 5.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

This nursing home also excelled in inspections. In fact, we gave it an A- for that category, which is one of our best scores. This is one of the few nursing homes with an overall grade in this range which earned multiple category grades this high. Inspection scores are tied to several pieces of information located in the a nursing home's government inspections. Nursing homes that score well in this area typically have very few deficiencies on those reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this place had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones labeled as 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 couple relatively minor deficiencies aren't something to panic about.

This facility received even higher grades in the area of nursing. In fact, it received one of our highest grades in that category with a score of A-. There are a variety of factors within this grade. Most of these datapoints relate to nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 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 facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can typically be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The final area we graded is long-term care. This facility was awarded a strong long-term care grade in our assessment, with a grade of C. Even though this was not as good as many of its other grades, this is nevertheless a decent rating for this area. Long-term care grades are used to score a facility's performance as a traditional nursing home, as opposed to focusing more on the skilled nursing services provided by a rehabilitation facility. Once we looked at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination data. We were somewhat surprised to discover that this nursing home vaccinated a relatively low 84.9315 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Nevertheless, this facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.