Elderwood at Amherst

On top of being a top notch nursing home overall, this place also performed well in inspections, where it received an A-. Not many facilities performed better in this area. Our inspection grades are based on items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this area have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Fortunately, although this facility had some minor dings on its inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also was given a impressive short-term care score. In fact, this is this nursing home's second best category grade. In that area, this facility received a score of A-. With our short-term care score, we endeavor to craft a meaningful measure for rehabilitation. In doing so, we assess the facility's levels of skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. Fortunately, it looks like this facility employs registered nurses. Not every facility employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the information this nursing home provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final metric we looked at in this area is the percentage of residents who returned home from the nursing home. We found that 6.4 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Turning to another strength for this nursing home, we awarded them one of our more favorable grades in our long-term care category as well, with a grade of B+. Nursing homes that receive this kind of grade in long-term care tend to provide consistent around the clock care to ensure residents are kept in good health. On top of assessing the volume of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 64.23841 percent of its residents, which is slightly less than we were hoping for. While its vaccination rate was a bit lower than we like to see, we were pleased to find facility was able to limit hospitalizations. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In our last category, we gave this facility a grade of A- for its nursing grade. This topped off a first-rate profile. Our nursing rating is primarily based on a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. 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 nursing home the nation in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by having a system of moving patients even once per day.