Fall River Healthcare

To go along with its strong overall grade, we awarded this nursing home a grade of A- for our long-term care grade. Facilities that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to residents. After looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we next considered the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 97.53087 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is significantly higher than the average nursing home. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In addition, this nursing home earned top notch inspections in recent years. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with an A-. Perhaps the most important factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a facility's inspection reports. Facilities with higher grades in this area typically avoided the more severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. This nursing home was assessed 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none of the deficiencies were considered severe. This means that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies to be an imminent risk to patient health or safety. We should note that deficiency-free inspections are uncommon in this industry.

In addition, this facility also received favorable nursing grades this year. In fact, we awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of B+. We scrutinized the qualifications of nurses working for the nursing home, as well as the number of hours the nurses were with patients, in determining our rating in this category. This particular nursing home provided 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, our nursing grades also factor in quality-based assessments, such as avoiding major falls. This facility performed well in this area. Avoiding major falls is typically a good indicator that a nursing home has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.

The final area we graded was short-term care. For this category, we gave this nursing home a C. In determining our short-term care ratings, we scrutinize the nursing home's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This score is often a meaningful assessment of a nursing home's ability to rehabilitate patients. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these types of nurses. However, based on the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. Lastly, we assessed the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 4.6 percent of this facility's patients returned home. At most facilities, closer to half of their patients are able to return home so this figure is below average.