Marie Esther Health Center

Marie Esther Health Center is a small non-profit nursing home located in Marlborough, Massachusetts. This nursing home turns out to be an A rated facility. This facility was given one of the best scores that we offer. A grade in this range requires superb marks across the board. We were not surprised to discover that this proved to be the highest rated facility in Marlborough. As you will see below, this place also performed just fine in our category scores. It's hard to poke holes in this place's profile.

One of the many reasons this turned out to be a great nursing home is that it received an A+ long-term care grade. This is simply as good as it gets in this category. Facilities that receive this type of grade in long-term care typically provide consistent around the clock care to make sure residents are kept in good health. In addition to looking at the quantity of care provided by nurses and other staff, we also looked at the percentage of residents vaccinated against pneumonia. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its residents. Vaccines are critical to keeping residents healthy. Clearly, this place is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had less than one hospitalization per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low number.

This facility has also received near flawless health inspections in recent years. We awarded them an impressive grade of A+ in this category. Inspection scores are based on datapoints found on the a nursing home's recent government inspections. Nursing homes that excel in this area tend to have very few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these places generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This place received 2 deficiencies on its inspection report, but fortunately none were considered severe. This means that the inspectors didn't consider any of the deficiencies to create an imminent threat to resident safety or health. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

This facility also excelled in the area of nursing, where it received a grade of A-. Few nursing homes performed better in this area. In determining a nursing home's nursing rating, we weigh the amount of time nurses are with patients as well as the level of licensure of those nurses. This nursing home provides 3.7 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also assessed several nursing quality measures and this place excelled in some of these areas. With less than five percent of its residents sustaining pressure ulcers, it performed as well as any nursing home the country in this category. This is generally a good indicator of quality nursing care. Pressure ulcers can many times be avoided by providing better nursing care, such as by having a protocol of moving residents more frequently.

In our final area, this facility also received an impressive short-term care grade, with a grade of B+. This finished off an elite report card. In the area of short-term care, we try to evaluate indicators of a facility's rehabilitation. We assess a nursing home's skilled nursing services, such as the ones performed by registered nurses and physical, occupational and other therapists. One reason for this place's strong score in this area is that it provides a significantly greater volume of hours of physical therapy to its patients than a typical facility. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of residents who eventually returned home from this nursing home. We found that 0 percent of this facility's residents were able to return home.