Lasell House

In addition to being an elite nursing home overall, this facility also performed well in our inspections category, where it earned an A+. Very few places performed as well in this area. Inspection ratings are based on pieces of information located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that excel in this area typically have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places should not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. Unfortunately, we were not able to locate deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This first-rate facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A+. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. Nursing scores are primarily tied to a nursing home's level of nurse staffing. This nursing home averages 0.5 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This nursing home performed very well when it comes to minimizing its residents' major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

An additional strength for this nursing home was long-term care, where it received an A+ rating. This is flat out as good as it gets in this category. Facilities that do well in long-term care tend to be well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. Once we concluded our assessment of the amount of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the facility's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is what we like to see. Pneumonia can be a dangerous condition for nursing home patients so we strongly prefer when a facility does not leave this to chance. Lastly, this facility was able to limit hospitalizations. In fact, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

In our final category, this nursing home was awarded another A+ for its short-term care rating, finishing off an amazing profile of A+'s in each of our categories. In forming these short-term care ratings, we quantify the nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as those performed by registered nurses, occupational therapists, physical therapists and other types of skilled professionals. The purpose is to formulate a measure for sizing up the rehabilitation services of various facilities. Fortunately, it appear that this nursing home has registered nurses on staff. Not every facility employs these types of nurses. On the other hand, according to the information this nursing home provided, it does not look like the facility employs physical therapists. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 6.8 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.