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 emphasize the fact that this facility fared very well in our short-term care rating. We awarded them a dominant score of A+ in this category. Our short-term care grade is commonly used to gauge a facility's rehabilitation services. To provide highly graded rehabilitation services, facilities generally need to provide better levels of highly skilled nursing services. These types of services include registered nurses, physical therapists, respiratory therapists and other licensed professionals. Fortunately, it looks like this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all facilities employs these skilled professionals. On the other hand, based on the data they provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. The final statistic we considered in this area is the number of patients that ultimately were able to return home from the facility. We found that 6.5 percent of this nursing home's patients returned home as opposed to remaining at the nursing home on a permanent basis.

Adding to its high-end profile, this facility also received a dominant long-term care grade, with a score of A. When facilities receive a score in this range in long-term care it typically means it has plenty of staff and is an overall good place to reside on a permanent basis. One of the datapoints we considered in addition to nurse's aid hours was vaccinations. This facility administered the pneumonia vaccine to 94.565216 percent of its residents. Vaccination is a great way to minimize unnecessary deaths for the senior population. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. 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 A-. This topped off a very impressive profile. Few nursing homes received an A- 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. Lastly, we also looked at some quality-based measures in this category. This facility fared well in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. For example, in terms of the number of its residents suffering from pressure ulcers, this facility performed better than the national average. This is generally an indicator that a facility has reliable quality controls in place. Pressure ulcers can typically be avoided with better nursing care.