Gorham House

One of the many reasons this ended up being a great nursing home is that it earned an A+ inspection grade. This is just about as good as it gets in this very important category. These inspection scores take several factors into consideration, including deficiencies and federal fines. You can find more information about each of these items by obtaining copies of nursing homes' inspection reports. While this nursing home had some deficiencies on its inspection report, none were major deficiencies based on CMS' deficiency scale. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also wanted to alert you to the fact that this nursing home was awarded a dominant grade of A in our short-term care area. Our short-term care grade is generally employed to assess a nursing home's performance with rehabilitation. In order to have good rehabilitation services, facilities generally must have better levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these skilled professionals. However, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final statistic we considered in this area is the number of patients that ultimately returned home from the facility. We found that 6.3 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the facility on a permanent basis.

Contributing to its strong resume, this facility also was awarded a strong long-term care grade, with a score of A. When facilities receive this kind of score in long-term care it is typically a good sign for patient care and indicates that the place is well-staffed with nurses and aids. One of the criteria we considered on top of nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. This facility provided the pneumonia vaccine to 94.270836 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a reliable method to avoid unnecessary deaths for the elderly population. Lastly, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is an impressively low figure.

The fourth area we assessed was nursing, where this nursing home received a grade of B+. This topped off a very impressive profile. Few nursing homes received a B+ or higher in all four categories. There are numerous data points included in this grade. Many of the data points relate to the quantity and quality of nurse staffing. This nursing home provides 0.6 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 facility has reliable quality controls in place. Major falls can many times be avoided if more nurses aids and better safety protocols are in place.