Fairhaven Healthcare Center

On top of earning a great overall grade, this facility fared even better in our inspections category which is based on the facility's recent government inspection reports. In fact, we gave it an A- for that area, which is one of our best scores. Our inspection scores are based on many items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Places that score well in this area have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. While this facility had a few minor dings on its report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you that the government inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A few relatively minor deficiencies aren't necessarily something to panic about.

One of the other reasons we graded this nursing home so highly is that it earned a very impressive nursing rating. In fact, nursing proved to be its second best category grade. In that area, we gave this facility an B+. Our nursing category consists of many components, many of which are associated with levels of nurse staffing. This facility provided 0.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at several nursing quality-based metrics 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 country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can typically be prevented by offering better nursing care, such as by employing a protocol of turning patients at least once a day.

In addition, this facility also received favorable long-term care grades in our assessment. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a score of B. For residents in need of a permanent place to live as opposed to skilled nursing, long-term care is an important category. After we finished assessing the amount of care provided by nurses, we next considered the facility's vaccination statistics. This facility vaccinated 60.913708 percent of its patients against pneumonia. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had only 0.02 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The final category we graded was short-term care. We awarded this facility a solid grade in this category, with a B-. Even though this was not on par with several of this facility's other grades, it is nevertheless not a poor grade. In calculating 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 create a barometer for sizing up the rehabilitation services of different facilities. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not every nursing home employs these skilled professionals. However, based on the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final measure we considered in this area is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return to the community. We discovered that just 4.6 percent of this facility's patients were able to return home, which is below average.