D'youville Center for Advance Therapy

D'youville Center for Advance Therapy is a small non-profit nursing home in Lowell, Massachusetts. This turns out to be an A+ rated facility, which is the most impressive score we offer. This is quite a bit better than most of the nursing homes in the city. This nursing home was also given strong ratings in all four of our categories. More information about these categories can be found below.

One of the reasons this place turned out to be a quality nursing home is that it earned an A+ in our inspections category. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Inspection scores account for several factors included in a facility's inspection reports. One of the most important criteria we weigh heavily is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. Places with better scores in this category tend to have very few of these severe deficiencies. 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.

We also wanted to emphasize the fact that this facility excelled in our nursing rating. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. We assessed the skill-level of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the quantity of time those nurses were with patients, in calculating our rating in this area. This nursing home provides an incredible 6.2 hours of nursing care per patient each day. Out of this total, many of the hours were provided by registered nurses, which is one of the most highly highly trained levels of nurses. On top of offering impressive levels of nursing care, this nursing home also excelled in the quality-based metrics we assessed. For example, it performed as well as any facility in Massachusetts when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We look at these areas as reliable measures of the caliber of nursing care being provided.

The third category we looked at was short-term care. This nursing home also was given an A+ short-term care grade, making it one of the few facilities to be awarded more than one A+ category grades. In the area of short-term care, we seek to evaluate indicators of a nursing home's rehabilitation services. We look at a facility's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical therapists. Remarkably, this nursing home provides roughly one and a half times as many hours of services from physical therapists and registered nurses than most nursing homes we looked at. The last metric we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from the facility. We found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in Massachusetts in this area with 64.3 percent of its patients returning home. At most facilities, fewer than half of their short-stay residents are able to return home.

In the final category, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our long-term care rating. This rounded out an elite report card. For residents seeking a permanent residence rather than rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. On top of considering the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down this place's vaccination data. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 0 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.