Kathleen Daniel Nursing and Rehabilitation

In addition to receiving a great overall score, this facility also earned an excellent short-term care score, with a grade of A-. In calculating our short-term care ratings, we look at the nursing home's skilled nursing services, including those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The goal is to devise a scale for comparing the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this facility has registered nurses on staff. Not all nursing homes employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the data they provided, they do not appear to employ physical therapists. The final item we considered in this category is the percentage of residents who were able to leave the nursing home and return home. We found that 5.5 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.

This nursing home also was awarded a strong long-term care grade. In fact, this is this facility's second best category grade. In that category, this facility received a score of A-. Nursing homes that do well in long-term care tend to provide patients with closer supervision and stay on top of routine healthcare services. In addition to looking at the amount of care provided by nurses and other staff, we analyzed the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. This facility gave the vaccine to 94.95549 percent of its residents, which is more than the majority of nursing homes. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it also excelled at keeping its patients out of the hospital. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This nursing home also received a strong nursing score. In fact, we awarded it an above average grade of B+ in this area. When calculating a facility's nursing score, we look at the quantity of hours nurses are seeing patients and the skill levels of the nurses. 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 facility excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any facility Massachusetts in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can generally be avoided by offering better nursing care, such as having a protocol of turning a resident more often.

Completing its excellent profile, this nursing home also performed well in our inspection category, which is based on the nursing home's recent inspection reports. In fact, we awarded it a B+ for that category, which is one of our higher grades. Perhaps the most critical factor we look at in calculating our inspection scores is deficiencies. These deficiencies are found on a nursing home's inspection reports. Nursing homes with better grades in this area most likely avoided the most severe deficiencies involving things like patient abuse. Fortunately, although this nursing home had some minor dings on its government inspection report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are ones found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This means that the government inspectors did not consider 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 an excellent sign.