Emerson Rehabilitation & Transitional Care Unit

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A+ for our inspections rating. Arguably the most important factor we look at in determining our inspection ratings is deficiencies. These deficiencies can be found on a facility's recent inspection reports. Places with higher scores in this area most likely dodged the most severe deficiencies involving health risks or even death. We weren't able to locate deficiency data for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This top notch facility also dominated in the category of short-term care, where we gave it a score of A+. Very few nursing homes fared better in this area. In determining these short-term care scores, we look at the facility's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists and other types of therapists. Our goal is to formulate a measure for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. 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 last metric we considered in this area is the percentage of patients who were able to leave the facility and return to the community. We discovered that 7.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home.

We also want to point out the fact that this facility was awarded an impressive score of A in our long-term care category. For prospective residents in need of a permanent residence rather than skilled nursing, long-term care grades are a key measure. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we looked at the number of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down information on vaccination rates. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

Moving on to our last category, this facility was given an extremely favorable nursing rating. We awarded it a grade of A in that category, resulting in this facility receiving straight A's. Nursing scores are largely tied to a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This particular nursing home provided 0.8 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this place 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 frequently be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of turning patients at least once a day.