Newbridge on the Charles Skilled Nursing Facility

One of the reasons this ended up being a great nursing home is it received an A+ in our inspections category. This is as good as it gets in this critical area. Inspection ratings are tied to many datapoints located in the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Facilities that score well in this area tend to have few deficiencies on their reports. Most importantly, these nursing homes generally do not have any severe deficiencies which are associated with endangerment of patients. It does not look like we were able to find deficiency counts for this nursing home. Finally, this facility had no substantiated complaints this year from residents, which is an excellent sign.

We also gave this facility a score of A+ for its short-term care grade. Short-term care ratings are critical for people requiring rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes more highly-skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means a wide range of services, ranging from registered nurses to physical and occupational therapists, as well as other forms of therapy. Remarkably, this nursing home provides roughly one and a half times as many hours of services from physical therapists and registered nurses than most facilities we looked at. This is a great sign. The last statistic we assessed in this category is the number of residents who ultimately were able to return home from the nursing home. We found that it performed as well as just about any nursing home in Massachusetts in this area with 68.3 percent of its patients returning home.

This facility also received a first-rate long-term care score. Indeed, this is its third most impressive category grade. In that category, we gave this facility a grade of A. For residents looking for a permanent place to live as opposed to rehabilitation, long-term care is an important category. In addition to looking at the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we also looked at the number of residents vaccinated for pneumonia. Unfortunately, we were not able to track down this facility's vaccination rates. Clearly, this nursing home is doing something right in this area as it was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. It had less than one hospitalization per one thousand long-term resident days, which is a remarkably low figure.

In the final category, we awarded this facility a grade of A+ for our nursing score. This topped off an elite profile. Our nursing score is largely tied to a facility's nurse staffing. This place boasts a really impressive 4.7 hours of nursing care per resident on a daily basis, of which a significant portion of those hours were provided by registered nurses. This is one of the most highly highly trained levels of nurses. On top of providing impressive levels of care, this nursing home also excelled in the quality-based metrics we assessed. It performed as well as any nursing home in the state in terms of avoiding pressure ulcers and major falls.