East Longmeadow Skilled Nursing Center

In addition to being a quality nursing home overall, this nursing home really excelled in nursing, where it received a grade of A. In determining a facility's nursing rating, we consider the amount of time nurses are with residents as well as the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home averages 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality measures and this nursing home excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility Massachusetts in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of moving patients even once per day.

In addition, this nursing home earned top notch health inspections in recent years. We gave them one of our better scores in that category, with a grade of B+. Inspection grades take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies, substantiated complaints and federal fines. You can learn more about each of these factors by reviewing copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. This nursing home was hit with 4 deficiencies on its inspection report, but we were relieved to see that none of the deficiencies were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies an immediate threat to patient health or safety. A few minor deficiencies are not something to panic about.

This nursing home is also strong in the area of long-term care, where it received a score of B+. It outpaced most facilities in this area. When nursing homes receive a score in this range in this category it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to live on a permanent basis. After we finished assessing the volume of nursing care, we next considered the facility's vaccination data. This nursing home vaccinated 97.59036 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia can be a dangerous health condition for nursing home residents so we prefer when a nursing home doesn't leave its residents vulnerable. Finally, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

The final area we graded is short-term care. This nursing home was given an above average short-term care rating this year, with a B-. Even though this isn't nearly as good as some of its other grades, this is still an acceptable grade in this category. Short-term care grades are critical for residents seeking rehabilitation. Rehabilitation generally utilizes more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a wide range of nursing services, spanning from registered nurses to physical and speech therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The last measure we looked at in this category is the number of residents who were able to return home from the facility. We found that just 4.4 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. Unfortunately, this was below average.