Christopher House of Worcester

One of the many reasons this ended up being a great nursing home is that it received an impressive inspection grade. In fact, inspections turned out to be its best category. In this area, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A. Arguably the most important factor we consider in computing our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with better grades in this category typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

Adding to its first-rate resume, this facility also was given a dominant long-term care grade, with a grade of A. Nursing homes that excel in this category typically provide residents with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. Once we finished looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 95.758934 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a life threatening health condition for nursing home patients so we like it when a facility does not leave its residents vulnerable. 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 only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

Adding to its strong resume, this facility also received an excellent nursing score, with a grade of A-. Our nursing grade considers numerous datapoints. The most heavily weighted variable is the quantity of hours nurses spend with residents. This facility provided 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 facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can often be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

In the final category we analyzed, this nursing home was given a very strong grade of A- in our short-term care category. With this grade, the nursing home finished off a straight A report card. Our short-term care ratings are arguably more important for patients requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation generally utilizes higher levels of highly-skilled nursing services. This includes not just nursing, but also physical and occupational therapy, as well as other variations of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we assessed in this area is the number of patients that returned home from the nursing home. We found that 5.7 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.