Nemasket Healthcare Center

We also would like to emphasize the fact that this nursing home has earned excellent government inspections in recent years. We gave them an A in this category. Inspection grades are tied to items located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Nursing homes that score well in this category typically have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these facilities generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with risks to patient safety. This particular nursing home had just a single deficiency on its inspection report and it was not one deemed to pose a threat to patient health or safety. Even some of the best nursing homes receive an occasional ding on their inspection report.

Contributing to its top-shelf assessment, this nursing home also was given a superb short-term care grade, with a score of A-. Short-term care grades are generally used to measure a nursing home's rehabilitation services. To have highly scored rehabilitation services, facilities generally must feature higher levels of highly skilled nursing. Skilled nursing includes registered nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This nursing home employs both physical therapists and registered nurses. Not all facilities employ these skilled professionals. Lastly, we looked at the percentage of patients who were able to return to the community from this facility. This proved to be a real strength for this facility. This place outperformed the vast majority of facilities in this area with 58.1 percent of its residents returning home. This is a significantly higher rate than most facilities.

Among its many impressive grades, this facility received an excellent nursing grade. In fact, we gave it a grade of A- in that category. In computing our nursing scores, we look at both the number of hours nurses spend with residents and the levels of licensure of the nurses. This nursing home provides 3.6 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at some quality-based measures in this category. This nursing home fared well in some of the quality-based metrics we assessed. By way of illustration, in terms of the percentage of its patients 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 often be prevented with better nursing care.

Turning to our next area, this facility was given an extremely favorable long-term care rating. While this wasn't as good as many of its other grades, this remains one of the more impressive scores we offer. Facilities that do well in this category typically are well-staffed and provide extensive hands on care to patients. Once we concluded our assessment of the quantity of care provided by nurses, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination record. This facility vaccinated 100 percent of its patients for pneumonia, which is an impressive figure. Pneumonia is often a deadly ailment for nursing home residents so we prefer when a facility does not take any chances. This place also keeps its patients out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 1.11 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days, which is a substantially better hospitalization rate than the majority of nursing homes.