D'youville Senior Care

D'youville Senior Care is one of eight available facilities located in Lowell, Massachusetts. We awarded this nursing home world class overall rating of A. In fact, it turned out to be ranked among the top three facilities in the city. This is just about as good of a place as you're going to find. If you look below, you will see this nursing home's category scores, which are just as strong as its overall grade.

In addition to being a great overall grade, this facility also received A+ health inspections in recent years. Its inspections were virtually flawless. Arguably the most important factor we consider in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. Deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Places with higher grades in this area most likely avoided the more severe deficiencies involving patient abuse or death. While this facility had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were severe based on CMS' scale. 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 received an impressive grade of A in our nursing category. Our nursing grade is mostly associated with a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home offers extremely high levels of nursing care, averaging 4.2 hours per patient each day. This is more nursing care than nearly any other place provides. Finally, this nursing home also excelled in several of the quality measures we assessed. With less than five percent of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility the country in this category. This is generally an indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Many pressure ulcers can be avoided by offering better nursing care and having a protocol of turning patients even once per day.

Turning the page to our third area, we gave this facility a score of A- for its long-term care score. This is a dominant grade. For residents in need of a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care is a very important category. Even though we determined this facility had a favorable amount of nursing hours provided by nurses and other nursing staff, we found its vaccination rate to be a bit low. It gave the pneumonia vaccine to just 80.6993 percent of its patients. This is one statistic we would like to see this nursing home improve on. Fortunately, this facility excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had only 1.1 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a significantly better hospitalization rate than most nursing homes.

In our final area, this facility also received an impressive short-term care score, with a grade of A-. This finished off a first-rate report card. Our short-term care scores are considered to be most important for individuals requiring rehabilitation from their nursing home. Rehabilitation usually mandates more skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes not just nursing, but also physical and respiratory therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. This nursing home employs both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities employ these skilled professionals. The last metric we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents that ultimately returned home from the facility. This place performed as well as just about any facility in Massachusetts in this area with 56.4 percent of its patients returning home. For most facilities, fewer than half of their short-term residents are able to return home.