Holbrook Nursing Home

The main reason this nursing home received a decent overall score is its impeccable health inspections in recent years. We gave it one of our better grades in that area, with a grade of A. This is a much better score than the place's overall grade, which was decent but certainly not elite. Our inspection scores weigh a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we weigh heavily is the number and severity of deficiencies. Places with higher grades in this category typically have very few severe deficiencies. While this facility had a few minor dings on its inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are labeled as categories G through L. This means that CMS didn't deem any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is always a good sign.

We also wanted to note that this nursing home was awarded a strong long-term care grade. In fact, we awarded it one of our best grades in that category with a score of A-. Nursing homes that do well in this category tend to provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. After looking at the volume of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination records. This facility vaccinated 98.30918 percent of its residents against pneumonia. Vaccines are critical to keeping patients healthy. Clearly, this facility is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. It had only 0.01 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In addition, we gave this nursing home a rock-bottom F in the area of short-term care. In the area of short-term care, we strive to evaluate measures of a facility's rehabilitation. We assess a facility's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and various therapists. Not surprisingly, we found that this nursing home provides far less physical therapist and registered nurse hours per resident than the average facility. Lastly, we looked at the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This was not a strength for this facility. We found that just 3.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home. At most facilities, around half of their patients are able to return home so this is well below average.

Switching gears to the next area, this nursing home did not perform very well. Due to a very poor grade of F in nursing, this is this facility's weakest grade. There are a variety of criteria included in this category. Most of these criteria relate to nurse staffing. This place provided just 0.3 hours of nursing care per patient daily. This is not a very impressive figure. To go along with its below average totals in the area of nursing hours per patient, this place had really poor marks in many of the quality-based metrics we looked at in calculating our nursing ratings. We looked at the percent of residents having falls which led to serious injury. This nursing home was at more than 150 percent of the national average in this statistic. This is alarming in light of the fact that so many falls could likely be avoided with better nursing care. This ended up sealing the nursing home's fate of earning a poor nursing grade.