Dedham Healthcare

One of the reasons this turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it earned a very impressive long-term care grade. In fact, this turned out to be its best category. In that area, we gave this facility a B+. Long-term care grades of this caliber generally require both around the clock care from nurses and aids, as well as quality routine medical care. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 95.43726 percent of its patients for pneumonia. Vaccines are vital to keeping residents out of the hospital. Lastly, this nursing home was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had only 0.74 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is an impressively low number.

One of the other reasons we rated this facility so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. This proved to be its second best category grade. In that category, we gave this nursing home a grade of B+. Our nursing rating includes a host of subcategories. The most important factor is the quantity of hours nurses spend with patients. This facility provided 3.2 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This place performed better than average in this area. This is often a good indicator that a place has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

This facility also earned favorable inspections in recent years. In fact, we gave them one of our better grades in that area, with a B. Our inspection scores are based on several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that receive favorable grades in this area typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. This place received 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none were considered to be severe. This indicates that the government inspectors didn't deem any of the deficiencies to be an imminent risk to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

The last area we rated is short-term care. This facility was given a grade of B- in the category. Short-term care ratings are important for patients looking for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes a broad range of services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other types of therapy. We were pleased to find that this nursing home employs both registered nurses and physical therapists. The same can't be said for all nursing homes. The final datapoint we looked at in this category is the number of patients that were able to return home from the facility. We found that it fared respectably with 47.7 percent of its residents returning home.